A uniformed officer approaches the door of a home in West Windsor. He demands to be let in — he is following up on complaints and reports of abuse.
When the homeowner lets him in the officer finds reason to issue summonses that could result in jail time for the alleged offender. Though the officer is armed, he doesn’t have to use his weapon this time, and for now it appears the situation is under control.
The evidence found at the scene may not be enough to convict, but it will ensure that the case is brought to court. What he found: A dog’s empty food bowl and an empty water dish.
According to Perry Link of Benford Drive, the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals subjected his family to just such treatment last summer when it issued two of what would be a total of eight summonses for mistreatment of Peaches, the family’s German Shepherd. (See Link’s letter to the editor.) Link’s wife, Tong Yi, answered the door when Al Peterson of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals arrived to investigate complaints stemming from West Windsor’s own animal control officer, Bettina Roed.
Peaches, who suffered from hip dysplasia and other ailments, was put to sleep this summer. But bitterness over events that took place while he was alive still remain.
Link and Roed first crossed paths when Peaches, who was subject to seizures, got out of his owner’s Benford Drive yard, which was protected by an electric fence. Roed says she had gotten multiple complaints from neighboring residents, and issued a summons to Link, who pleaded guilty and paid the township’s $50 fine. According to Link, that occurred in 2001. According to Roed, the dog was reported loose several times, and Link was fined for the offense in 2001 and in January of 2006.
“I was just doing my job,” says Roed. “He insisted on having an invisible fence, but the dog would get loose, and it had a lot of school kids upset. The dog suffered seizures, and it was putting her in a potential seizure situation. In December [2005] he finally tied her up,” though not in a manner that Roed found acceptable.
Link, who is a professor of East Asian Studies at Princeton, specializing in 20th century Chinese literature, is no stranger to confrontations with authorities. As an academic authority on contemporary Chinese culture, he co-edited “The Tiananmen Papers,” documenting the student-led demonstrations in 1989. Link has been banned from traveling in China since 1996.
Link’s face-off with the animal control officer reached the boiling point when, Link claims, Roed entered his property uninvited and went into his garage to examine Peaches, who was now tied by a tether that allowed him to go in the backyard, under the deck off the rear of the home, and into the garage. “I came into the garage and she was in the garage with him,” says Link. “She said the prongs on his collar were irritating his skin and causing him to bleed. She called the hospital on her cell phone, and said I had to make an appointment right then. I said rather sternly, ‘Thank you for reporting the condition of my dog, now please leave my property.’
“Then she started monitoring my home regularly. She took videos of Peaches getting tangles in his leash. I wrote letters to the mayor and the chief of police because I thought she was going too far. I got nine summonses in all. I can’t prove they were because of my letter to the mayor, but the summonses started 10 days after I mailed it.”
Roed’s entire career has been devoted to animal welfare. “I feel like I’ve worked rescue my entire life,” she said in an interview with the News in 2004. “When I was in high school, I raised orphan kittens. It was no different than having an infant — I was awake every two hours.”
Roed moved with her family from Denmark in 1980 when she was 15 years old. Her father ran the Scanticon Hotel in Plainsboro (now the Princeton Marriott on College Road East). She graduated from Princeton High School.
After working with a kennel in Princeton, she attended Harcum Junior College in Philadelphia, where she received an associate degree in animal science. After being a veterinary technician, she worked toward becoming a certified animal control officer.
After trying to work as the animal control officer while living in Princeton became too difficult, she moved to Plainsboro seven years ago. “Crossing Route 1 would sometimes take 45 minutes and that is too long in an emergency situation.” The animal control officer for both West Windsor and Plainsboro since 1993, Roed formerly worked under the health departments where she took care of cat and dog licenses. Now she works with the police.
Roed’s concern with Peaches’ presence in Link’s garage and under his deck, she says, is not part of any personal vendetta against Link. In fact, the proper housing of dogs is an issue Roed says she has had to explain to many West Windsor homeowners. Letting a dog live in an unheated two-car garage “is not appropriate,” says Roed. A dog house has to be big enough so that a dog can stand up and turn around, but not so big — such as a two-car garage — that the dog cannot use his own body heat to stay warm. The best designed dog houses resemble igloos, she says.
“Usually it just takes education,” Roed says. “You show people there’s a better way to do this.”
The monitoring of the home, she says again, is part of her job. As for the videotape mentioned by Link, Roed describes it as “disturbing. I am flabbergasted he could do this to a dog.” Roed was also concerned about Peaches’ weight loss, from around 100 pounds to 75. But, counters Link, the weight loss was a result of illness, not maltreatment.
But Roed says Link “is so busy going after me, that he has it in his mind that he has done nothing wrong.” But, she claims, the case is not just her side against his: “This case was prosecuted by the SPCA. In cruelty cases, I don’t have the right to file charges, but as a police investigator, I have the right to do an investigation.”
Link, who has lived in West Windsor since 1999, was given six SPCA summonses for “deprivation of necessary sustenance” in January, 2006. He had a court appearance as a result of the infractions, and he says in the following week, Peterson arrived at his home, as described, and issued two more summonses to Link’s wife.
While Link eventually pleaded guilty to the “empty dish” charge, he says he did so only to avoid further time and money in court. The fact is, he says in his letter to the editor, the food bowl and water dish were empty because the dog had just eaten. Peterson did not respond to messages left for him at SPCA.
Roed, whose department is under the watch of the Police Department, acknowledges that she was given an internal reprimand for entering the property without permission.
Link claims that Police Chief Joseph Pica told him he gets more complaints about Roed than about the rest of his staff combined. But when interviewed by the News, Pica had complimentary things to say about Roed. “Mr. Link was given adequate notice of the complaints. If he had heeded the warnings, this all could have been avoided. This all stems from him not having the proper doghouse,” said Pica.
The doghouse infraction would cost Link over $6,”000. He hired a lawyer to fight the charges against him. In the end, by late 2006, he pleaded guilty in West Windsor municipal court to the charge of not providing an adequate shelter. He paid $240 for that offense, and signed an agreement that he would not own a pet for the next seven years. “It was humiliating to have to put up with that,” said Link, who owned Peaches for over 10 years. “I felt dishonest in making the plea. I don’t think I was guilty of that, I just did it to save the $1,”000 it would have cost to have the case postponed and have another day in court.”
Peaches’ veterinarian, Dr. James Miele of the Princeton Animal Hospital on Alexander Road, says Link was not an abusive owner. “He cared about his dog, he brought Peaches in when he wasn’t’ feeling well. He never questioned running tests or expenses.”
Miele says Link may not have done everything by the book, but he says the complaints against him were excessive. “Pet owners are like all other people and parents. Nobody does everything perfect. Every driver speeds at some point. Everyone tries to do a certain level of their best.”
The veterinarian would not comment on Peterson’s performance. He says he has other clients who have complained of Roed’s excessive nature. “I think she’s a very caring, dedicated individual and an advocate for the animals out there that have no homes. She goes to extremes. I’ve seen her take animals away from people that shouldn’t be taken away. She oversteps her bounds.”
Says Miele: “I think what happened is Mr. Link got caught up in what became a power struggle.”
Or as Roed says, making one small point on which she and Link might agree, “animals are not the problem; people are.”
