at 07:05 on February 03, 2011, EST.
James Keller, The Canadian Press
Share|VANCOUVER - The man at the centre of a horrific slaughter of up to 100 sled dogs says half the dogs that were put down were old, sick or "not adoptable."
Robert Fawcett and the company that bought his business, Outdoor Adventures, issued a statement late Wednesday night in an effort to answer some of the questions hanging over the case which has grabbed headlines around the world, but the statement left many more questions unanswered.
The statement said Fawcett advised the owner of Outdoor Adventures, Joey Houssian, in mid-April 2010 that he estimated about 50 dogs from Howling Dog Tours would have to be euthanized.
"These dogs live to run and were not able to do so and would have had to be kept in cages with the result that they would have had very poor or virtually no quality of life," the statement said of the animals owned by the Whistler, B.C. company.
Fawcett was the general manager of Howling Dog Tours and contracted his dogs to Outdoor Adventures, which had a financial stake in the company. Outdoor Adventures has said it took over full control of Howling Dog Tours last May, the month after the dogs were killed.
Both the RCMP and SPCA began investigating after WorkSafe BC documents came to light earlier this week describing the deaths of up to 100 dogs in vivid, gruesome detail. The worker at the centre of the WorkSafe claim was awarded compensation related to post-traumatic stress from the incident.
The WorkSafe documents allege the animals were shot and dumped in a mass grave after business collapsed following the 2010 Winter Olympics.
The joint statement from Fawcett and the company doesn't refer to 100 dogs, only the 50 it said needed to be put down. The WorkSafe documents suggest Howling Dogs had 300 in total and the general manager felt pressured to get rid of a third of them.
The statement simply lists points that Fawcett and the company agree on.
It said "considerable efforts" were made for the dogs to be adopted both before and after mid-April 2010, but "the efforts at adoption were not as successful as hoped."
It said no instructions were provided to the man on how to kill them, but that Fawcett was known to have "very humanely" put down dogs on previous occasions.
The WorkSafe documents indicate the dogs were shot and others had their throats slit.
On Wednesday, Fawcett was removed from the board of directors of a group that sets voluntary guidelines for the industry.
"We're not assigning any guilt on him and we certainly don't have any more information than anyone else," Mush with Pride president Karen Ramstead said from Perryvale, Alta., where she runs a kennel for Siberian huskies.
"We just felt that our bylaws allowed for this if a board member was bringing unwanted attention to Mush with Pride, which is what we felt this situation was doing. It was not portraying Mush with Pride in the light that we felt was going to further our cause."
Ramstead, who said she doesn't know Fawcett personally, said she sent him an email informing him of the decision. He replied that he understood the group's position, she said.
In December and January, someone with the same name posted messages to at least two Internet forums for people suffering from post-traumatic stress. The posts described the slaughter and the mental anguish that followed.
The profile for Bob Fawcett on ptsdforum.org lists the user as a 38-year-old man from British Columbia.
In a forum on the same website a man identified as Bob Fawcett posted a lengthy entry on Jan. 6, 2011, identifying himself as the owner of a "large dogsled company for the last 15 years" and describing the slaughter of dozens of animals over two days in April of last year.
The posting said the poor economy forced him to sell his company to a "corporation" about two years ago, and he suggested the new ownership pressured him to keep costs low. The posts said the unnamed corporation refused to sell any of the 330 dogs under his control, until money became tight.
"I was told the company was going to fold unless we took drastic action," said the posting.
"The drastic action would be the immediate disposal of half the herd. There is no more money and the owners would only continue on if we did the reduction and went with a new business model, less dogs, less costs. These were my family. I reluctantly agreed to the job as I have always euthanised the older or injured dogs myself."
The allegations have outraged some, and RCMP are now investigating threats sent by email and posted to social media websites.
On the website, the user also writes at length about the emotional toll the slaughter has had on him.
"I have been diagnosed with complex PTSD," says the forum posting. "I'm pretty dead emotionally. I can't sleep, I have regular flashbacks, I sometimes drop when I hear a dog bark, and gun shots freeze me solid."
The description is strikingly similar to an account contained in a decision by WorkSafe BC to award an unidentified dog sled operator for post-traumatic stress.
The WorkSafe BC documents says the worker spent two days shooting the animals and dumping them in a mass grave.
Corey Steinberg, a lawyer for the worker who filed the compensation claim, has said his client was told to make the business more cost effective. Steinberg declined further comment on Wednesday.
Premier Gordon Campbell announced a task force that will examine what happened and make recommendations to prevent similar cases in the future. The probe will be led by a Liberal politician who is also a veterinarian and will include the SPCA and the Union of B.C. Municipalities.