Animal-Cruelty Debate Rages In Small Iowa Town -- National Outcry Follows News Of Cats' Slaughter

FAIRFIELD, Iowa - On the night of the slaughter, 16 cats were bludgeoned to death and a cultural divide was laid bare.

Three high-school students, young men who'd never been in trouble, allegedly hatched the plot in a parking lot at the Hy-Vee food store. They are accused of driving off, first picking up two baseball bats, and then sneaking into a house at the edge of town - a haven for strays founded by a couple who had moved to central Iowa from Los Angeles.

The next morning, the shelter's driveway resembled a triage site, an animal mobile military hospital.

Veterinarians sorted through the bashed and bloodied, deciding which to treat on the spot and which to rush off for the hour's drive to Iowa State University for care.

Feline corpses smoldered on a funeral pyre as the sobbing shelter director sank to his knees to pray.

Cyberspace debate

Within days of the March incident, arguments ignited as well, not just in this town of 10,000 people, but on the Internet and in the pages of animal-rights magazines pushing for tougher anti-abuse laws.

The debaters took the measure of the lost lives of Gimpy, Whitey, Little Moe, Pumpkin, Puff and the rest of the victims. They weighed them against the potential of those charged: Chad Lamansky, Dan Myers and Justin Toben, each 18 years old.

And they came to very different conclusions.

Some cried out that cat-killing is murder and should be punished accordingly, with hard time. Others countered that boys and cats, like foxes and chickens, are natural enemies, made to annoy each other, especially in rural areas. Don't ruin the suspects' future, they counsel; let them grow up.

"This is a small town, but this is not a small-town issue. It's a national issue," said Laura Sykes, who founded the Noah's Ark shelter with her husband, David.

Officials of the Animal Legal Defense Fund and the Humane Society of the United States agree.

"Cats were killed at a shelter. It's like going into a church and killing," said Sykes. "That's lost on certain people around here."

Jefferson County Attorney John A. Morrissey has announced charges that could lead to 10-year prison sentences if the young men are convicted.

Toben, whose lawyer says he kicked one cat but did no further harm, agreed in July to testify against the others in exchange for leniency: 200 hours of community service and three years of probation.

As a November trial looms, Morrissey's office has filed thousands of letters and printouts of e-mail from all over the globe into a cache of cardboard boxes.

Most favor prison terms

Nearly every missive clamors for prison for Lamansky and Myers, who have pleaded not guilty. The writers quote the Bible and Gandhi, and refer darkly to serial killers Ted Bundy and Jeffrey L. Dahmer.

Send a message, they urge, that beating animals to death is a serious crime.

"I hope some judge doesn't order community service," wrote Rita Sieg of Cleveland. "I pray they get the max!"

Only a few bear a Fairfield postmark, and those strike a very different chord.

"I agree what they did was wrong," wrote resident Sue Beall in a typical note. "But to go to prison? . . . How many things did you and I do growing up that we wished we wouldn't have done?"

Rural boys and country cats never have gotten along, another woman, Dixie Haynes, said in conversation: "I think it's a thing that boys have. You used to see them out hunting, targeting cats with .22s."

No ordinary town

Local reaction is complicated by the fact that Fairfield is no ordinary tall-corn, light-manufacturing town.

It has a distinct New Age overlay, resulting from the presence of Maharishi International University, which bought the campus of Parsons College in 1971.

Guru Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, who brought transcendental meditation to the Beatles and tens of thousands more, has visited his school only once.

Yet nearly 2,000 practitioners of TM have settled here. Among them are Laura and David Sykes.

The old-timers and the significant minority of "meditators," as they're known locally, have coexisted peacefully, but the graft never really took hold.

The relationship is far from hostile, though. The majority in town watched admiringly as the meditators established high-tech and mail-order businesses.

The natives grumble about rising rents, but in the next breath mention the boom in construction and remodeling work.

The newcomers traipse to the campus each morning and evening to meditate under separate golden domes for women and for men.

"They're . . . (a pause) . . . different," said Dixie Haynes. It's an oft-heard refrain.

Meditators are sometimes just as baffled by the natives.

The Sykeseswere taken aback by the number of stray animals wandering through Fairfield when they moved here in 1983 to be near the university and other meditators.

They were surprised that Jefferson County's method of animal control is a sheriff's deputy with a gun.

The town has no humane society, no dogcatcher - a common situation in rural Iowa, according to the director of the state's chapter of the Animal Rescue League. A local veterinarian takes in strays brought to him - and euthanizes them if they are neither claimed nor adopted within seven days.

As David Sykes took on a consulting job, he found himself scooping abandoned animals off the streets. Shelter filled a need

Rebuffed by the county and city governments when they lobbied for more help for homeless animals, the Sykeses resolved to address the issue themselves. In 1990, they bought 34 acres on Fairfield's outskirts and started the Noah's Ark Foundation.

There, the cats have the run of the main residence (the Sykeses live elsewhere).

On the grounds, kennels contain heated, wood-and-shingle houses for the canine contingent.

The goal is to find someone to adopt each abandoned cat or dog. But if an animal is not chosen, it can remain at Noah's Ark.

In the spring, Laura Sykes moved from town to a mobile home at the site, in part to provide security at night. But on March 7, she was traveling on the West Coast.

That was the night friends saw Chad Lamansky at the Hy-Vee, a popular Fairfield High hangout, bragging that he'd skinned a cat at his family's farm. One student who was there told her mother that Lamansky showed off the hide and that the conversation escalated until someone proposed slaying the strays at Noah's Ark.

Thomas Walter, Toben's lawyer, says his client drove Lamansky and Myers to his home to get the bats and then to Noah's Ark. He stood lookout as the others set to work. Quite soon, the lawyer said, Toben grew sickened by the assault and said he was leaving. The other two went with him, got a ride to a fourth young man's house and "may have returned" to the shelter, Walter said.

There were about 75 cats in the house. When a Maharishi University student arrived to take the first shift of volunteer duty the next day, he spied the first bodies and, fearing poison, summoned David Sykes.

The attack had been brutal. In addition to the dead, seven cats suffered injuries that included a broken leg, broken jaw and a severely damaged eye.

Arrests came quickly. So did interest from animal-rights groups. "Nationally, we are seeing a rise in incidents involving animal rights and juveniles," said Pamela Frasch, who heads the anti-cruelty division of the Animal Legal Defense Fund.

Northeastern University criminologist Jack Levin recently finished a three-year study that compared 153 Massachusetts animal abusers to neighbors of similar age and gender and concluded that those who commit violence against animals are five times as likely to commit violence against humans.

"This could be a make-or-break moment for these kids," Levin said. "You don't want to give these teenagers a slap on the wrist."