Letter: Compassion for a fellow animal lover

Friday, March 24, 2006 | 7:16 a.m.

I was very upset to read in the March 22 Las Vegas Sun about Judy Long, who has breast cancer and has been fined by the Clark County Health District for desert dumping. The Health District claims she dumped two dead guinea pigs over her wall.

Because I'm an animal lover and I've had cancer, I know that Long, a sick and unemployed mother of two, does not need the stress of having to pay an outrageous fine, which she can't afford, for something no one can prove she did! The Health District needs to get a big dose of compassion!

If there was a witness, then I can see giving her a fine, but I still believe $1,400 is outrageous for two little guinea pigs that would turn to dust anyway. Not that I believe she did it. But even if she did, they weren't like a sofa or a gallon of motor oil.

It seems to me that she's an animal lover, and you don't throw something you love over a wall to get rid of it when it dies. And because she has breast cancer, we know that cancer treatment zaps your strength and energy. So throwing anything over a 6-foot wall would be a great effort for her and, as she said, why would she do it when she has trash pickup two times a week?

So is there something that we, the citizens of Las Vegas, can do to help this woman? I don't have the money to pay her fine. But if there was a fund set up to pay the fine, I'd donate to it.

But I'm hoping that out of 208 pages of attorneys listed in our yellow pages that one would have the compassion to step forward and represent her pro bono, and get the fine dropped.

Beverly Duchene, Las Vegas