Wildlife Sanctuary Moves Away but Stays in Authorities’ Sights

Deborah Warrick has moved her pack of wolves and other wild animals from Thousand Oaks to Paso Robles, but she still can’t shake the legal problems that dogged her here.

Warrick, 42, left her Soul of the Wolf wildlife sanctuary in remote Carlyle Canyon in September under pressure from Ventura County officials. Now she faces charges in San Luis Obispo County.

The nonprofit center is home to a cougar, leopard, lion and tiger. In addition, Warrick breeds wolves, lynx and a tiny animal from North Africa known as the fennec fox.

The Ventura County district attorney’s office is looking into whether she forged a document required by state Fish and Game Department authorities in September 1993 when she was still operating in the county, and she is set to appear next month in a Grover Beach courtroom to answer to 13 misdemeanor charges in connection with her facility in northern San Luis Obispo County.

“The charges are basically involving the manner in which wild animals are to be caged,” San Luis Obispo County Deputy Dist. Atty. Andrew Baird said. They stem from an inspection of the facility Nov. 23 by Fish and Game Warden Todd Tognazzini.

“She has to answer various charges involving the structure of the caging,” Tognazzini said. “The caging has requirements as to how they must be welded together. A couple of the cages are under size, and a couple of the cages are supposed to have mesh underneath.” The mesh prevents the animal from digging out of the enclosure.

Tognazzini said Warrick’s facility also lacked proper draining of an animal enclosure. “In this case, it had finished raining. There was not sufficient drainage,” he said.

“If she’s going to keep the animals there, some things are going to have to be done to protect the animals,” Tognazzini said.

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Warrick said she’s doing that very thing, taking in wild animals abused by others. As for the ongoing problems with authorities, Warrick said that being a single woman and running a facility on her own make her an easy mark for officials out to show how powerful they can be.

“From what attorneys tell me, I’m an easy target. I’m a little blond female living on a mountaintop just trying to do my own thing, and they’re trying to shut me down,” Warrick said.

“But this little blond bites. She bites hard.”

Warrick admits to minor code violations and said she is correcting the problems. As to the forgery allegation, Warrick said, “I will swear on a stack of Bibles that I did not forge that signature.”

While no criminal charges have been filed, a deputy district attorney said there is another year left before the statute of limitations runs out.

Lynn Hall, 72, of Camarillo also breeds exotic animals and has sold some to Warrick. He said her problem may be that she doesn’t like authority.

“She doesn’t go along with the bureaucracy telling her what she can do and what she can’t do,” said Hall, who breeds fennec foxes. “I don’t think she’s willing to go along with all they want her to do.”

When it comes to saving an abused exotic animal, Warrick acknowledged that she has no problem meeting someone in a parking lot to pick up the animal and then withholding from the U. S. Department of Agriculture the name of the person from whom she took it.

“I will take animals and won’t tell them who I got it from,” she said.

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Last year, the Ventura County Planning Department determined that Warrick was operating without a conditional-use permit and gave her until Sept. 30 to obtain a permit or close the facility, which she had for about five years. She chose the latter, she said, because she could afford neither the permit fees nor the upgrades required by the county.

Without notifying state or federal officials, Warrick moved the operation to 95 acres west of Paso Robles. An ad in a local newspaper invites visitors to “pet and play with adult wolves, bottle feed wolf cubs . . . and even receive a new hairdo from our affectionate Siberian lynx.”

Warrick said she does not charge people to visit the compound. She does, however, require those interested in volunteering for her so-called Run With the Wolves tour to take a training course in advance for a fee of $75.

She has yet to receive a use permit from the San Luis Obispo County Planning Department, and her exhibitor permit issued five years ago by the U.S. Department of Agriculture is invalid because her new facility has not been approved by department officials, said Jim Rogers, a spokesman for the USDA Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service.

Rogers would not discuss Warrick’s case specifically. “But, in general, it could be a violation if someone is operating with an invalid license,” Rogers said.

Tognazzini said Warrick is in violation of an order he issued that the animals be removed from the Paso Robles facility until Warrick makes the necessary changes.

“When we finished the inspection and realized there were problems, we gave her notice that the animals should be moved immediately to a facility that is up to standards until her facility has been brought up to standards,” he said.

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To this day, the animals remain at the facility, and Warrick said she’s doing all she can to comply with Tognazzini’s order. She played down the problems.

“It was an oversight on my part on the cage size,” she said. “We’re in the process of redoing the cages the way Todd wants them. He came up here and saw the post sizes were not big enough for what he thought and for what the regulations thought they should be.”

Warrick said the citation should have been nothing more than a fix-it ticket like when a driver is cited for a blown tail light. Instead, she has received a bid of more than $22,000 to bring the cages into compliance.

“Most people get 45 days to comply. I was not given any time. I should be given a chance to comply. I was given a form that said get rid of your animals immediately,” she said.

When the animals were moved from Thousand Oaks to Paso Robles in October, two wolves died in transit, Warrick said. Both wolves had been tranquilized prior to the move, she said.

“They were untamable wolves. The only way to capture them is with a dart gun. That’s what we did. But their hearts just couldn’t take it,” Warrick said.

Documents obtained by The Times show that Warrick had the opportunity to resolve her dispute with state officials two years ago. All she had to do was leave the state.

In a letter dated Feb. 10, 1995, Warrick’s attorney at the time, Brenton L. Horner, told Fish and Game Warden John Wilcox that Warrick would leave the state since no criminal charges had been filed in the forgery case.

The letter stated, in part: “Ms. Warrick is moving from the state of California and plans to leave on or about May 31, 1995.”

Warrick characterized the discussion about leaving the state as nothing more than banter. “He was not speaking accurately for me,” she said of Horner.

“I would never agree to that because I was innocent. Leaving the state would have said I forged that signature, and I did not,” she said.

“We were just trying to get them off our back.”