2 facing animal cruelty charges

The SPCA confiscates 18 animals from a home, and two men are accused of using a pot-bellied pig as bait to train bulldogs to hunt.

By CURTIS KRUEGER

© St. Petersburg Times, published April 11, 2000

ST. PETERSBURG -- Peeking through the slats of a wooden fence on 35th Avenue N, a St. Petersburg police officer saw two men teaching their American bulldogs to lunge at a 15-pound pot-bellied pig.

When he confronted the men, one of them, Sean Berns, said he trained dogs to hunt and that he wasn't doing anything wrong, Officer Christopher R. McCarthy said in a report.

"He asked the officer if he'd ever eaten bacon, and what harm is it to kill a pig?" police spokesman Dan Bates said.

The pig suffered bruises and scratches and was having trouble walking. It was taken to an animal hospital Monday afternoon for X-rays, said Beth Lockwood, executive director of the SPCA of Pinellas County.

Berns, 33, and Steven Demitrius Jackson, 28, of Largo, were charged Sunday with animal cruelty, a third-degree felony. Other animals were confiscated from Berns' home.

Berns told a reporter Monday, "I do not believe I have broken the law." He declined further comment on his lawyer's advice.

"He basically doesn't see that he did anything wrong, and he wants his dogs back," Lockwood said.

Jackson could not be reached.

Berns told the officer he worked as a dog trainer for PetSmart, a pet store on Tyrone Boulevard. A woman at the store who identified herself as a manager, and who gave her name only as Heather, said that "right now he's not going to be working here until further notice."

"We are conducting our own internal investigation," she said.

Police said the two had broken a provision of the law that prohibits baiting of animals, which means to "provoke, or to harass an animal with one or more animals for the purpose of training."

But the same law specifically allows people "to hunt wild hogs or to retrieve domestic hogs." It also allows people to use animals while working with livestock.

This particular pig is mostly a pot-bellied variety, Lockwood said. Pot-bellied pigs became something of a pet craze in the early 1990s, and some local governments decided to classify them as family pets rather than livestock, which meant people could keep them at home without having an agricultural zoning on their property.

Because of the pig incident, the SPCA confiscated 18 animals from Berns' home at 3270 35th Ave. N, including four American bulldogs, a dozen bulldog puppies, a mastiff and the pig.

Lockwood said she thought the dogs were being trained to hunt, not to fight each other. The dogs did not have the scars she would expect to see if they had been trained to attack each other, she said.

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