Woman Stands To Lose Dogs She Calls Her Life Kootenai County Officials Say Kennel Doesn’t Meet Health Standards, Must Close

Mary Smith fears the cage door is closing.

Since her childhood in Kellogg, the Idaho native’s love of white dogs has been her passion. Since 1974, her outlet has been the dozens of snowy American Eskimo dogs she houses in a barnlike kennel tucked into the hills south of Interstate 90.

But at 61, the widowed Smith is in her fifth year of a battle with Kootenai County over the sanitary conditions of her operation. She expects defeat.

“They’re going to handcuff me, take me to jail and steal my dogs,” she says.

Not quite. But county officials do say the kennel must be shut down, the dogs given away or killed if things don’t change.

Commissioners recently denied her application for a license, saying her operation doesn’t meet health standards.

“There’s two issues here,” says Commissioner Dick Compton. “She’s not meeting the same conditions everybody else has to meet. And the animals are caged together in a … situation that’s not good for them.”

Smith’s 38 dogs - down from 89 a few years ago - live in a row of cages behind her Cataldo cabin. The cages are separated by mesh and wood, some housing up to three dogs. The floor is concrete. The area smells of urine and feces.

“All animal places stink,” Smith says. “Dog places, cow places, horse places. You can’t keep animal places from stinking.”

The Social Security recipient can’t afford a new $40,000 kennel - or a staff to help keep her dogs groomed. She does the feeding and cleaning herself.

“She might go hungry, but those dogs never would,” says supporter Lou Horvath. “They are her reason for living.”

But county animal control officer Dusty Rhoads says there are simply too many animals for the space. Plus, wood surfaces are impossible to keep sanitized and the cages are often dangerously wet and cold.

Smith contends these ancestors of sled dogs are tundra natives, capable of withstanding temperatures of -55 degrees. And if there’s disease, she says, why aren’t the dogs dying?

They clearly aren’t. Released, the tiny dogs scamper about the yard, chasing one another and yipping at Smith’s boot-strapped ankles. When she reopens the cage, they re-enter eagerly. Smith’s teary face breaks into its first grin in 30 minutes.

“They are happy,” says Pete Nikiforuk, director of the Kootenai Humane Society. “But that’s because they don’t know any different. They’ve lived in cages all their lives.

“You couldn’t put one in my home or your home,” he adds. “They don’t make good pets.”

Smith has a long list of supporters who have purchased her dogs in the past, but the now-adult animals are too old to draw the buyers they once did - “everybody wants puppies,” she says. Her dogs are 1 to 7 years old.

“She wants to keep them until they die,” Nikiforuk says. “I understand that. She loves them with all her heart, but …”

The bottom line, Compton says, is she is violating the law.

“It’s a sad situation, but that’s it,” he says.

Smith can appeal, and probably will, but she fears the dogs eventually will be taken away.

“What am I going to do if they’re gone?” she asks. “My dogs are my life, they’re my babies.”