Kato And Kleo Move To Florida

After living in the North Haven Animal Shelter for six years on death row, dogs Kato and Kleo have finally been freed and are on their way to Florida, where they will live out their days in an animal sanctuary.

And one of Hamden’s longer-running controversies is being put to rest — without the dogs themselves being put to rest.

“The dogs will live their lives in proper care, surround[ed] by attentive and loving facility managers,” Hamden Mayor Curt Leng wrote in a statement announcing the decision.

At 1 p.m. on Wednesday, the Free Kato and Kleo Facebook page posted that the dogs are out of the shelter, and shared ​“freedom ride” pictures of the two on their way to Florida. By 5 p.m., the post had received around 3,600 reactions and 1,400 comments.

Kato and Keto have become social-media stars since 2012, when the two Rottweilers escaped the yard of their owner, Kim Miller, who lives in Hamden, and allegedly attacked an elderly woman who was trying to protect her granddaughter. The woman ended up in the hospital. She said she would have died had not a large group of people beat the dogs back with baseball bats.

The state placed a kill order on the dogs. They were placed in the North Haven animal control shelter.

When the Department of Agriculture issued an order for euthanasia, Miller appealed the decision, drawing out a lengthy court battle.

The dogs were kept quarantined at the North Haven facility. Hamden shares an animal shelter with North Haven because it doesn’t have one of its own.

Acting Hamden Police Chief John Cappiello told the Independent that normally when dogs are quarantined, they can receive no visitors whatsoever. Then-Mayor Scott Jackson and Police Chief Thomas Wydra, he said, made an exception for Miller. Miller brought elected officials to the shelter to raise attention to the dogs’ plight. A Facebook video of the dogs’ birthday party in captivity (complete with birthday hats) drew over 77,000 viewers.

Cappiello told the Independent that the rules about visitation were strict because ​“we have to protect the public.”

If another incident had happened, he said, the town would have been liable. ​“I don’t think it’s going to take a jury, a judge very long to determine that we’ve got to pay some money,” he said.

Leng echoed Cappiello, saying that ​“it’s the end of the ballgame if another incident happened.”

Though the state issued the kill order, the impetus was on the town to schedule a date for the euthanasia. Due to the passionate activism of Miller and of others who hoped to rescue the dogs, Leng and other town officials tried for years to find alternate solutions that would not involve putting the dogs down.

It turned out that one possibility would be to send the dogs out of state. That’s the agreement that was finally completed this week after what Leng called ​“an extraordinary and unfortunate lengthy amount of time.”

Visitation Controversy

Kato and Kleo hit the headlines again last month when Hamden Legislative Council Rep. Justin Farmer published an opinion article in the Independent about an encounter he had with the Hamden animal control officer and the North Haven police when visiting the dogs with Miller.

In the article, Farmer argued the town had been unresponsive to his concerns that racial bias had played a role in the incident. When Farmer went to visit the dogs in December, Animal Control Officer Chris Smith called the North Haven police for backup, even though he had never done so for either of the two previous visits by politicians.

As outlined in a previous article in the Independent, Smith’s decision may have been the result of discipline he had received for letting previous officials into the cage, which was not allowed.

In an interview with the Independent, Leng and Cappiello explained that Smith is not a police officer and has no power to make arrests.

They explained that on the morning of Farmer’s visit, Miller called Smith to say that Farmer would be accompanying her. When Smith told her that he would not be allowed in the cage, he said she got agitated. That prompted him to call his supervisor, Ronald Smith, to ask what to do.

According to Cappiello, Ronald Smith told Chris Smith that he could call the North Haven police for backup if he thought it was going to be a problem, which he did.

“This had nothing to do with Justin, why the police were called, it could have been mayor Leng,” said Cappiello. He explained that the outsize reaction was a result of the rules having been broken in the past.

Farmer told the Independent that even so, the administration has not been clear with him about what the rules are, and that he was not satisfied with the changes that had come out of the incident — that animal control officers now wear body cams.