Barnyard animals confiscated from West Kensington home

Agents from the Pennsylvania Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals arrived in West Kensington yesterday to find a man running out of a house and down the street leading a bull tied by the neck with a 25-foot extension cord.

Another man had carried out an animal described by eyewitnesses as anything from a tiger to a cougar, said SPCA director of law enforcement George Bengal.

Bengal said it may actually have been an ocelot. Agents weren't able to find a cat, but Bengal believes it may have been hidden in another house down the street.

The two men were described as friends of the owner, who had his own barnyard in the back yard of a house on Indiana Avenue near Fourth Street.

The humane agents managed to corral the bull, which was so young it only had buds where its horns will sprout, when it stopped in the middle of Indiana Avenue and refused to go any farther, Bengal said.

The animals' owner, identified as Alex Rivera, denied to TV reporters that he had a cat among his backyard menagerie, and said he'd rescued some of the animals from a butcher.

"The guy kept stating that he was keeping the animals as pets for his kids, like a little farm," said SPCA agent Wayne Smith.

Besides the bull, Smith said that agents had confiscated a lamb, two goats, three chickens, three geese and two ducks.

Bengal said that the owner told officers he had bought the bull from a butcher and intended to sell it to a slaughterhouse when it was fully grown. He said that the owner - who buys real estate, fixes it up and resells it for a living - had the animals for about a year.

City ordinance bans farm animals from the city, although horses are permitted.

The animals were emaciated but the lamb was worst off and was on life support at PSPCA headquarters with a gangrenous wound on its neck from an infection, Bengal said.

Smith said that there was hay and straw in the back yard and a lot of corn on the ground.

"They all went quietly, no one resisted arrest," Smith said of the barnyard denizens.

This was his first bull, Smith said, but he once caught a goat at 10th and York streets at 3 a.m. and, in another case, encountered three alligators in a living room. *