A TRAGIC MISTAKE
Grief-stricken family seeks to make sure others don’t lose beloved pets due to hunters’ mistakes
On Jan. 7 Chris Heller walked his dogs Hunter and Freya to the northern Lake Ontelaunee trailhead just yards from their Richmond Township home. He removed the leashes from their collar and harness combinations to allow them to run.
He’s done such long trail walks thousands of times with the various large-breed dogs he and his wife, Jennifer, have had over the two decades they’ve lived in woods not too far off Route 662. She said the dogs are trained to return to him when Chris whistles.
As he followed the dogs, he was surprised to see a hunter along the trail. The man informed him that he and some friends were taking advantage of this year’s extended antlerless deer season and had just pushed one hillside and were driving the other one.
“So I said to him, ‘OK, we’ll finish this loop and then we’ll get out of your hair’,” Chris said Jan. 16.
Chris, once a hunter himself, said he would have put the dogs’ orange vests on them that day if he had known it was still hunting season.
He said he completed the circle and was heading down the hill to leash the dogs when he heard a shot ring out. Then came the sickening yelp of a dog.
“Please tell me you didn’t shoot my (expletive) dog!” Chris said he yelled as he ran about 40 yards to get to Hunter.
Freya was standing right by Hunter, who was snapping at the air trying to get whatever had wounded him, Chris said. There was blood everywhere.
“I turned him a few times to see where it was coming from and I saw he was gut shot,” Chris said, his voice thick with emotion. “It came out his left leg I think, in the rear.
“I yelled for someone to help me carry him out and nobody came for what seemed like a long time, so I grabbed him, threw him over my shoulders and I ran as fast as I could down the hill and then started walking because I was out of breath already,” said Chris, 55.
The hunters eventually did come out to the trail and Chris said they had him put Hunter on the ground while they applied pressure. Chris phoned Jennifer and told her to call the vet and to try to get someone down to the Water Street trail access in Maidencreek Township to help him get Hunter out of the woods.
“Of course I was screaming, I wasn’t a happy boy,” Chris said. “I had to yell, ‘Which one of you shot him?’ several times before the guy said, ‘I did. I thought he was a coyote.’
“And that’s all he said, not ‘Geez, I’m sorry I shot your dog, I thought he was a coyote,’ nothing like that.”
Other members of the hunting party were apologetic, he noted.
“He had to have known he was a dog,” Chris said. “If he hadn’t had a scope and he was far away, I could maybe see it, but dude, you had a scope, you had to see the harness, the collar, the silver freaking clasp connecting the two.”
Chris said Hunter died before they could get to Route 662 as they were taking him to Silver Maple Veterinary Clinic.
Sorting it out
Jennifer, 48, and Chris said they hoped the hunter who killed their Hunter would have his hunting license revoked for a time and be required to take remedial hunter’s education. The Pennsylvania Game Commission has repeatedly said “no game law violations were detected.”
The game commission was asked for a copy of the report by its investigating officers to ascertain the hunters’ version of events and the Reading Eagle was told to file a Right to Know Law request in order to obtain the information. A request form was emailed to the PGC Thursday night.
A Northern Berks Regional Police incident report says one of its officers arrived at Water Street after a dog had been taken to the vet. The report notes a hunter said the dog was shot by mistake, that the hunters said the dogs were not wearing fluorescent orange, the owners were not near the dogs at the time of the shooting and that a subsequent conversation with the dog owners confirmed the dogs were not leashed.
Maidencreek Township’s leash law states that pets may not “be at large or without controlled restraint either upon the public streets, alleys or sidewalks in the Township of Maidencreek or upon property of another, including the property of the Township of Maidencreek or any school district.”
However, the land where the incident occurred is owned by the Reading Area Water Authority, which allows the PGC to use the land around Lake Ontelaunee for its Hunter Access Program Cooperative Agreement and Private Cooperative Habitat Agreement.
State laws on dog leashing leave a lot open to interpretation.
The Pennsylvania Department of Agriculture website says: “All dogs must be under control and must not be allowed to run at large.”
Section 53.26 of the Pennsylvania Code covers dogs on PGC land (which Lake Ontelaunee trails are not). Subsection C says “The owner or handler shall keep the dogs on a leash not exceeding 6 feet in length or on a multilength mechanically retractable leash while on Commission property” and subsection D adds “The owner or handler shall keep the dogs under supervision and control while on Commission property.” There are exceptions listed for hunting dogs.
Jennifer said she thinks there should be signs at trailheads warning people when hunting season is.
“There’s horseback riders that come down there, there’s people that come from the city just to enjoy some country air,” she said. “Now you’re going to tell me everybody knows exactly what all these extra hunting seasons are? Not everybody knows. Maybe a little heads up would have been nice.”
“There’s a huge amount of hunters down here, and we can tell,” Jennifer said. “So my husband doesn’t usually take them for walks during hunting season or if he does, he has these orange vests for them.”
She said she is rethinking allowing her grandkids to walk the Lake Ontelaunee trails.
“Even in the summer do we go out with them?” Jennifer said. “We love doing that.
“There’s something about taking little ones out in the woods so that they can actually collect acorns, or find a turtle or play in the mud or do whatever. And I don’t know if we’re, how we’re going to plan that.”
Hunter’s story
The Hellers adopted Hunter in August 2022 from Howling Woods Farm in New Jersey. It’s a nonprofit registered with the IRS as Luv2Howl Animal Rescue that “provides education and information to general public, governmental officials, and shelter operators for the ultimate benefit of wolves and wolfdogs,” according to its mission statement.
One of Hunter’s caretakers, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said the rescue received him when he was about a year old.
“He was originally adopted out, but the man fell on hard times, so he was with us for quite some time, up until he was 8 years old,” she said.
“He has always been just a gentle, really sweet goodtempered animal — a really, really affectionate animal, very pet quality,” she said. “He was great with kids, great with most other dogs.”
She said she was very happy that the Hellers checked off all the boxes on their strict pre-adoption checklist and passed the rescue’s home check, which included a concrete-reinforced fence.
“Hunter was a malamute mix,” the caretaker said. “He was never DNA tested. We take northern breeds, we take wolf-dogs. The couple had owned wolf-dogs in the past and they had permits and stuff like that. He was never on record DNA tested.”
Another mistaken identity
When Kayla Quales heard about Hunter being killed, it brought a rush of bad memories.
“This is a very hard topic for me to revisit,” said Quales, 31. “Not a day goes by that I don’t think of my Lilly pup. She was my first baby, and dealing with her loss has been a huge challenge and traumatizing to say the least for my family and I, not only because of her early and questionable passing, but the negative/judgmental comments brought about when her story broke, and ultimately the failure of anyone to bring her justice.”
Lilly, a 10-month-old border collie/setter mix, was shot and killed by a crossbow arrow on Nov. 9, 2013, when she wandered off Kayla’s parents’ property in Albany Township.
Quales said at the time that the property owner where Lilly died told her that hunters he allowed on his land said another hunter they did not know killed the dog because he mistook it for a coyote.
“Somebody didn’t identify their target,” Quales said Thursday. “It scares me because I played in those woods. That’s where I grew up. We were often playing man hunt and everything like that. If somebody’s not identifying their target, that’s what scaring me.”
She was told the commission would investigate. Lilly’s collar was confiscated and never given back.
The Reading Eagle was told by the PGC to file a Right to Know Law request for records on the case, which was done Thursday night.
Quales said she was told that even though they found the arrow, which had a traceable serial number on it, her only recourse would be to sue the hunter.
To her knowledge, the hunter did not suffer any repercussions for his failure to identify his target or for shooting her dog.
“After this incident happened — I am not a hunter and I could never kill an animal, but I grew up with hunters — I did take my hunter’s safety course just to see what hunters are told. What kind of safety are we being taught? Because we have a weapon in our hands.”
Properly identifying a target before pulling the trigger is something that has been hammered home in hunter safety courses for decades.
“We use the S.M.A.R.T. mnemonic to include ‘Make Sure and positively identify the target.’ This coincides with instruction in many other topic areas of our Hunter-Trapper Education course where the importance of positively identifying the target is reiterated many times,” said Travis Lau, PGC communications director, in an email last week. “It gets discussed in the ethics and laws section, the turkey hunting section, the section on hunting related shooting incidents and in some of the zone of fire and shot placement videos. Students hear about making sure their target is what actually what they think it is all throughout the course.”
Starting in 1969, Pennsylvania required all first-time hunters under age 16 to take a four-hour class. In 1982 the requirement to take an extended class was expanded to all first-time hunting license buyers regardless of age.