At 76, she has a nose for troubled kennels

She doesn't look like a dedicated undercover operative, this 76-year-old animal lover with arthritic knees.

But she is. Now Helen Smith is expected to provide key testimony against a veterinarian who serves some of Pennsylvania's big dog-breeding kennels and who has been charged with animal cruelty on allegations that he mutilated a puppy's tail.

"I seem harmless," Smith said yesterday, describing how she gets around with a cane. In fact, "I'm not harmless at all."

At 2 p.m. March 10, she went to Country Lane Kennels in New Providence, Lancaster County, to try to acquire a one-eyed dog she had seen. There, accompanied by an undercover officer from the Pennsylvania Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, she unexpectedly witnessed the act that led to the first-degree misdemeanor charge against Thomas F. Stevenson of the Twin Valley Veterinary Clinic in Honey Brook.

A Lancaster County police criminal complaint states that Stevenson treated a 9-week-old mixed poodle's already injured and bleeding tail by "soaking it in scalding water" and then cutting it off with shears "without sedation or prior numbing of the tail."

Stevenson could not be reached for comment yesterday; messages left at his clinic were not returned. If he is convicted of animal cruelty, his license could be suspended or revoked.

"The dog was screaming, and screaming, and screaming," Smith said yesterday. "You could see the blood. You could see the exposed bone."

Smith is the mother of Bill Smith, founder of Main Line Animal Rescue in Chester Springs, which has strived to improve conditions for thousands of dogs in Pennsylvania's puppy mills. As Bill Smith began to be more recognized, making it hard for him to get into kennels, his mother started taking his place.

Helen Smith has been infiltrating kennels for close to a decade, scoping out conditions, rescuing animals, and informing authorities of what she finds. Many places she visits are feces-laden warehouses where dogs are confined in small pens.

But long experience did not prepare her for what she said she saw March 10.

Smith had gone to Country Lane Kennels, owned by Samuel E. King, to check on a dog she had often noticed tied up outside. The dog was a brown-and-white mixed bulldog, dirty, with an injury that had claimed an eye.

Smith and the undercover SPCA officer were walking through the kennel, she said, when "I heard this screaming. I can't tell you - I almost passed out."