Exotic Bird Farm Dogged By Hungry Canines Couple Blames Neglected Neighborhood Dogs For Death Of Expensive Rheas, Emus

Renee and Boyd Barry sleep fitfully.

The slightest nighttime noise is a red alert. Leaping from bed, the Elk couple grab loaded shotguns at the back door and run to their livestock pens.

In the last week, marauding dogs have slaughtered five of their rheas - large flightless birds worth up to $5,000 each.

The Barrys shot one of two dogs they found early Tuesday in the pen with the dead rheas and three live ones. The other dog got away.

Two days earlier, the couple saw the same dogs take down a white-tailed deer across the road.

Two years ago, dogs killed a pair of the couple’s emus on their Frideger Road property. They estimated the birds were worth $40,000. Though they found paw prints, they didn’t find the dogs.

“It’s unbelievable,” Renee Barry said. “There’s nothing we can do.”

In the recent killings, the dogs are believed to belong to - or at least live with - neighbors Christine and Patrick Libby, said Marianne Sinclair, director of Spokane County Animal Control.

Since 1991, Sinclair and her officers have monitored emaciated and unlicensed dogs at the Libbys’ mobile home.

The dogs kill, neighbors say, because they’re starving. The Libbys couldn’t be reached for comment and didn’t respond to a message left with Christine’s mother.

In the rhea killings, Christine Libby has been cited with keeping vicious dogs, letting her dogs run loose and not licensing them. But neighbors doubt anything will change.

Just two years ago, Patrick Libby was charged with cruelty to animals after neighbors discovered his dogs eating his own goat alive.

Court records show Libby paid $50 restitution. Sinclair said Spokane County District Court Judge Donna Wilson could have banned the couple from having animals, but didn’t.

“Only a District Court judge can make that order,” Sinclair said. “I sense the neighbors have total frustration with the system now.”

Since then, the Barrys have lived in fear that their fledgling exotic animal farm would be wiped out. The recent attack left them without breeding pairs. Now they have no use for the $7,000 egg incubator they bought a few months ago.

“This has been an ongoing fight with them,” Barry said of the Libbys.

Other neighbors are worried too. Brenda Olstad fears dogs will attack her horse, her aging dog or even one of her young sons.

The families have only one recourse - kill the dogs when they come onto their property and threaten their animals, Sinclair said.

Boyd Barry estimated that he’s already killed six to 10 of the Libbys’ dogs as they tried to climb over or under a fence to get his birds.

“I hate to kill dogs,” Olstad said. “But we have to protect our property and animals. But as soon as one dog gets killed, they bring in two more to replace it in two or three days.”