Nearly 90 Chihuahuas have a second chance at life after being found living in squalor in the home of an accused animal hoarder.

(Photo's courtesy of ABC 6 News)

Ricky is getting lots of love and medical attention at St. Hubert’s Animal Welfare Center in Morris County.

“It’s heartbreaking, but I’m really glad they’re here,” Kim Kancylarz, of St. Hubert’s, said. “We’re trying to take good care of them and they have a second chance.”

Ricky and 87 other Chihuahuas were rescued from a house in South Philadelphia, where the remains of two deceased dogs were also found. Seventeen of the survivors were transferred to St. Hubert’s, where they’re recovering from dehydration, skin problems, and the fear of human contact.

“He’s shaking right now. He’s not really sure what to do with us,” Emily Walker, a worker at St. Hubert’s, said. “He’s getting along really well with other Chihuahuas, they all love each other, but they’re not really sure how to react to human handling.”

While authorities in Pennsylvania plan to charge the dogs’ owner with 130 counts of animal cruelty, the experts at St. Hubert’s say hoarding pets often begins with an animal lover with good intentions.

“They may start out with the idea that they’re going to find these poor, helpless animals good homes, but then they’re unable to give any of them up and it escalates to the point where this is the result,” said Nora Parker, another St. Hubert’s staffer.

Physically, the Chihuahuas are in pretty good condition, and the biggest challenge is gaining their trust.

“I think they need to start in a quiet home, with someone who has a lot of patience and time to give them – and let them on their own become closer and closer – and at the end they’ll probably be little snuggle balls,” Parker said.

Each dog is progressing at it’s own pace, and it may be a few weeks before some of them are available for adoption, but there are a few that may be ready for a loving home this weekend.

Update 7/23/10:  Their first steps outdoors were tentative.  The dogs didn't know what grass was, an animal rescuer said of the Chihuahuas that his group took in from among 88 seized Rotonta.

"When we took them out on grass, it was actually sad," said Bill Smith, of Main Line Animal Rescue. "I don't think they knew how to walk on grass."

"They're lovely dogs," Smith said. "They're not the least bit aggressive, which is a bit unusual for Chihuahuas. They're just very frightened.

"We work with a lot of puppy-mill dogs. They're very similar to rescues from puppy mills. It may take a few months until they are comfortable walking around your living room."

PSPCA chief operating officer Marc Peralta said that PSPCA staff was still working with 20 of the Chihuahuas because they're "pretty unsocialized."

The Animal Alliance of New Jersey took in 27 Chihuahuas. Ten were newborns, and another four pups were born soon after arrival. Several other rescue organizations have taken in some of the Chihuahuas. All are being spayed or neutered.

To inquire about adoption, call the PSPCA at 215-426-6304 and dial 0 for the operator.

Update 7/27/10:  The problems at 739 Earp St. started almost a decade ago. At its center, we find systemic failure, feces and neighborhood feuds.

  (Photo courtesy of Nina Sachdev/the Philadelphia Weekly)

“We knew it was bad, we just didn’t think it was that bad,” says one neighbor.

The house, owned by Frank and Antoinette Rotonta, is occupied by Richard and Frances Rotonta.  Frances Rotonta has already signed forms to voluntarily surrender the dogs.

It’s hard for the officers to catch the dogs because they’re running loose through all three floors of the house. To speed things along—all in all, the raid took about eight hours—PSPCA officer Betty Sorrel asks Rotonta for her assistance rounding up the rest of the animals. “It just makes it easier and quicker; the dogs will go to her,”

  (Photo courtesy of the Philadelphia Weekly)

News cameras on the scene film PSPCA Director of Law Enforcement George Bengal describing the two to three feet of feces that reportedly cover all the floors and junk in the house. “It’s deplorable,” he says. “Feces everywhere, the ammonia is extremely high in the house, there’s no outside ventilation. It’s uninhabitable for humans.”

A worker from the Department of Licenses & Inspections takes a quick tour of the house and condemns it.

Neighbors who lived under the foul cloud of the Stink—a horrible stench that radiated from the house —and within earshot of what sounded like “a gazillion puppies” had tried to get the city to do something about the house for years and years. Some residents fled, moved out of the ’hood altogether. Some who remained are considering it now, disheartened by the city's inefficiency.

Fran Rotonta says that she believes she is the target of a harassment campaign. “So yeah I had the dogs,” she admits, but “they blew it out of proportion, believe me.”  Rotonta, when first contacted the day before the raid was adamant that she owned just four dogs and two cats. “And I make the cats go in the kitty litter,” she added.  “It’s bullshit,” she said. “I can’t take it anymore.”

But the complaints were not about the dogs, because no one knew how many were inside the house. They were about the Stink—which by all accounts was impossible to blow out of proportion.  “If you opened your mouth you could taste it, like your face was shoved into a litter box,” said one neighbor who reluctantly kept his air conditioner on in an unsuccessful effort to block the odor from invading his home.  “I almost puked the other day just taking out my recycling,” he says.

Neighbors say the Stink was bad as far back as they remember, but it became “exponentially” worse in the last two years.

“Last summer was what kicked a lot of people into action, when Fran put some kind of exhaust in the bottom back window that would just constantly spew out the horrible stench,” a resident said.  Then the rats came, according to residents.

Frustrated and grossed-out neighbors, some living on Earp Street, some on Sears and Medina streets, the blocks directly behind the house, and a few just within the neighborhood at large, say they’ve called every city agency and private organization they could think of for help over the last decade.

They called the PSPCA, L&I, Philly311, the Women’s Humane Society, the city’s Public Health Department, the Streets Department, the Department of Human Services, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), Councilman Frank DiCicco’s office and the PPD’s 3rd District, which covers that South Philly neighborhood.  But help never came. Callers were referred to other agencies; complaints slipped through a loophole in protocol.

Marc Peralta, COO of the PSPCA, says the organization opened the case against Rotonta in May 2009. But in order to get a search warrant, the PSPCA needs an eyewitness to alleged animal abuse or photographic evidence to constitute probable cause. Since no one on Earp Street ever saw any dogs outside, and the windows of the house were covered, the agency could not get a warrant.

Without an eyewitness, all PSPCA could legally do was knock on the door and leave notes requesting the homeowner call them to set up a voluntary inspection. The PSPCA claims it did that five times, but never received a call back from Rotonta.

Despite the fact that the PSPCA’s hands were tied, residents say the PPD would always refer them back to the PSPCA.

The spiral continued with Philly311. The agency assigned a “tag number” but nothing ever came of it. Sources say the Women’s Humane Society, PETA, Public Health, Streets and DHS all said it wasn’t their problem.

Then there’s L&I. Residents claim they filed complaints with L&I as far back as 2003. Though L&I had open violations against the house as recently as June 22, for overgrown weeds, trash, the infestation of insects and rats and “pet odor,” L&I Commissioner Frances Burns’ office did not explain how the house had violations for “the interior” if no one had ever entered the interior.

According to Bengal, the PSPCA frequently coordinates with L&I, so had an L&I worker entered the house, that officer could have served as the eyewitness the PSPCA needed to obtain a search warrant.

Technically, the government could have seized the house since it has had a tax lien since 2004.

For a while, neighbors say they also tried to appeal to Councilman DiCicco, (sending complaints via certified mail) hoping he would put pressure on L&I. No action was taken.   “The city completely let this neighborhood down,” says one resident.  Some residents even speculated that Councilman Frank DiCicco, known to be a habitual of an upscale South Philly Italian restaurant where Rich Rotonta’s brother has been slinging drinks for the past 30 years, was protecting the family in some way.

“I asked someone about the barking one time,” says a former resident. “And they said that [Rotonta] had two dogs and a bunch of parakeets that learned how to mimic the dogs, which was supposed to be why it sounded like so many animals were in there.”

Some residents were convinced there was a dogfighting ring in the basement, or a puppymill or some other type of abuse. Or worse.

“The only time I’ve ever seen any sign of life, and this lends to the serial-killer theory,” says one resident. “All of a sudden the door to the backyard area, which is never open, there was a hand that suddenly poked through from behind one of these coverings and it was hacking at the door handle with a screwdriver.”

The day before the raid, Rotonta stated she received a letter from the PSPCA that same day—the day the agency secured the search warrant—saying that someone reported that she abused a cat. At the time, Rotonta sounded genuinely shocked and outraged by the allegation. “I would never do that,” she said. “I love animals.”

PSPCA won’t confirm the exact charge made by the eyewitness, whose statement enabled PSPCA to secure a search warrant. But sources say rumors are swirling that with the system failing, an animal activist went renegade: It just may have been a false tip to the PSPCA that got them the search warrant.

False tip or not, the next day, PSPCA had the goods it needed to obtain the search warrant they’d been trying to secure for over a year. The Rotonta's’ house was finally raided.

Rotonta believes she is the target of a harassment campaign, which she says began a year and a half ago after a dispute with a neighbor over a bag of leaves. She says vines from her yard fell onto his property and when he cleaned them up and bagged them, he received a ticket when he put the bag out on the sidewalk. They argued over who should pay for the ticket.

“I even paid the ticket! I was nice!” says Rotonta. She said that since the argument, spiteful neighbors sent cops, PSPCA agents and pizza deliveries to her house, and that the harassment was making her sick.

“Last year, I had a heart attack,” she says. “It’s upsetting me, and now it’s starting again, "They’re all liars.”

When Rotonta spoke after the raid, she said she had come from the heart doctor that morning and was advised not take on any more stress.

But Rotonta seeks to defend herself against what she sees as a witch hunt.  “Did they tell you that they were terrorizing me?” she asks, referring to the nebulous group of “newcomers” she believes has been harassing her.

“Did they tell you that people throw things in my face when I come home?” she asks. “Yes, bleach and things are thrown in face. These are supposed to be professional people, and I quote. But they’re nothing but a bunch of sneaks.

Rotonta says she began gathering evidence of the harassment the day before the raid, but she says the papers got lost in the shuffle.

One of the papers was a letter that had recently arrived that enraged Rotonta. Rotonta says that the letter accused her of elder abuse against Antoinette Rotonta—her mother-in-law who has been dead since 1968.

“I think you should know how nice they really are, what kind of people they really are,” she says, adding that she's, “going to get a lawyer and sue them.”

“It’s one person on the block ... a lynch mob?” she says. “And he was heard, by my husband and a couple of other people, that he wanted the house knocked down so he could build his house more.

“I’m going to move because I can’t take this anymore.  It’s B.S.,” she said before the raid.

Despite the raid and the shock of the squalor, Rotonta has her supporters. “Every dog will have its day,” said one woman on local television news, a friend of Rotonta's’ who identified herself under a fake alias for various news outlets.

Eager to get the dog-day message out, the woman reiterated the statement during the raid.  She clearly perceives the call to the PSPCA as insult or attack.  “They were being fed. It’s not like she starved them. Did you see how healthy they were? Their ribs weren’t showing, they weren’t bit up like [with] Michael Vick,” she reasoned.  “That’s not fair what they did to her,” she says.

“I’ve known her all my life,” says one neighbor at the raid. “Clearly she loves animals.”

“That’s not love,” responds another longtime neighbor, who said she was shocked there were so many dogs in the house. “That’s sick.”

Many residents who know Rotonta personally say they just aren’t interested in “feeding into the neighborhood bullshit.”  “It just makes everybody more inflamed and nothing gets done,” he says. “It’s not productive.”

Local rescue and adoption networks went into overdrive the night of the raid. With the local shelter taxed to beyond capacity, there simply wasn’t any room to keep the dogs at the Hunting Park’s Animal Care and Control Team’s shelter or the PSPCA’s headquarters on Erie Avenue.

As for Rotonta, with 130 summary citation charges of unsanitary conditions, the minimum fine may be almost $195,000. According to the PSPCA’s Bengal, Rotonta also won’t be able to legally own a pet for 90 days per each citation, which adds up to 32 years.

       (Photo's courtesy of the Philadelphia Weekly)

Since Rotonta cooperated with authorities by voluntarily surrendering the animals at the raid, the case will likely not go to court. If the case doesn’t go to court, the tipster’s identity will remain sealed.

But questions remain unanswered. In Philadelphia, city ordinance says 12 pets is the limit. Many wonder: Why or how does a person wind up with so many animals?

Many hoarders start out working with animals in some way. Bengal confirmed Rotonta used to breed Chihuahuas a few years ago. Without Rotonta talking, one can only assume it simply got out of hand—a common genesis of an animal hoarding problem.

Animal hoarding is a strange type of animal cruelty because perpetrators don’t get off on the physical abuse of animals. They aren’t out to make a buck off the pain like dogfighters, either.

Experts say one of the characteristics of hoarding is that the sufferers are generally unaware or unable to accept that they are not caring for the animals properly.

“It’s only within the last 10 or 15 years that it’s been studied to any degree,” says Gary Patronek, Vice President of Animal Welfare at the Animal Rescue of Boston.

It’s estimated that 40 percent of people who hoard stuff hoard animals, too.  It’s becoming such a problem that, according to Patronek, mental-health professionals are advocating that hoarding be classified as a distinct disorder in the new Diagnostic and Statistic Manual of Mental Disorders, due out May 2013.

A cruelty officer in New Jersey says it’s become common over the bridge, where he’s pulled sheep out of row homes. It’s exploded in Philadelphia, too.  “We used to see cases of animal hoarding maybe once a year or so,” Bengal says. “But lately, it’s about once or twice a month.”

Update 9/9/10:  Rotonta, 49 faces 133 charges of animal cruelty, said nothing when she appeared in Municipal Court said Commissioner Ken Snyder, “This ought to be fun” when he looked at Rotonta’s paperwork.

“Look at all these! 133 charges of animal cruelty. This is insane,” Snyder said.

Richard Rotonta was not charged with animal cruelty, though activists say he should have been.

“The defendant’s husband was not charged because the Pennsylvania SPCA received information that he was not staying at the residence,” says Liz Williamson, the PSPCA’s director of public relations. “Also, the defendant clearly stated that she was the owner of the animals.”

Neighbors on the South Philly block insist that Richard did live in the house.

The trial is scheduled for Sept. 21.

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