It was hard to feel any sense of triumph Tuesday afternoon in the courtroom of District Judge Susan Watters.

Linda Kapsa, the dog breeder and animal collector from Ballantine, was sentenced to 20 years under the supervision of the state Department of Health and Human Services and she will be allowed to own no more than three dogs, all of which will have to be spayed or neutered.

In declaring what other animals Kapsa would be allowed to keep, Watters sounded like she was reading the lyrics to some bizarre variant of "The 12 Days of Christmas": 20 chickens, 10 goats, four horses, three cats and two cockatiels.

Kapsa contended that she has been a good steward of the animals in her possession since the county raided her Shady Lane Kennels last December and seized 200 dogs and sundry other creatures.

Her testimony rang rather hollow, coming as it did after Deputy County Attorney Ingrid Rosenquist presented a slide show of what deputies and rescue workers encountered during the raid. There were photos of dead puppies huddled together in a filthy pen; adult dogs caked with mud and feces; a puppy with a large, open sore on its belly; a dead dog sprawled on the floor of Kapsa's appallingly filthy trailer house.

A thousand words

The testimony of the photographs needed no elaboration and they all delivered the same message - that this was most likely a woman incapable of caring for so much as a single cockatiel.

What was saddest about this case was that Linda Kapsa, under slightly different circumstances, could have been the kind of woman all of us could admire. With her leathery skin and no-nonsense manner, she might have been the archetypal Montana ranch woman.

She is clearly a tough old bird. She told the judge how she milked and butchered her goats, fed her chickens and tended a half-acre garden. She still likes to ride her horses, she said, but because of back problems "I can't go out and do the whoopee-up like I used to."

What Watters recognized, and repeated several times while imposing the sentence, was that Kapsa had serious mental problems that prevented her from recognizing how bad things had become on her place. To hear Kapsa talk on the witness stand, she was running an exemplary business and breeding beautiful dogs, until a string of bad luck and bad weather resulted in a couple of unfortunate situations.

She did not seem evil or sadistic, only delusional. At one point she said she didn't want to turn any of her dogs over to "big, high-falutin' " rescue groups because they engaged in "mass euthanasia." She really did appear to be unaware that many of her dogs had suffered fates far worse than euthanasia.

Watters did the right thing by trying to prevent Kapsa from hoarding and abusing animals but not punishing her too harshly. What the state really needs, of course, are laws preventing these kinds of situations from developing in the first place. Many of our legislators, alas, are delusional, too, so don't hold your breath.

Kick them when they're down

Some of the mean-spirited criticism aimed at Kapsa sounded similar to what was said about homeless people, after we ran a story recently about the mess around the Montana Rescue Mission.

An amazing number of commenters said we should run the homeless out of town, put them on an island, close the mission or otherwise make life miserable for people with nowhere to live. You don't suppose these are some of the same people who felt so much compassion for Kapsa's dogs, do you?

As for simply closing the mission or buying the homeless one-way bus tickets to somewhere else, a 2007 survey showed that just under half the homeless in Billings had lived here more than five years, and nearly a quarter of them had lived here all their lives.

More telling is that the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs estimates that a third of all homeless people nationwide have served in the armed forces. Is that how we reward the men and women who put themselves in harm's way for the rest of us - with a one-way bus ticket or a kick in the pants?

Fortunately, few of those commenters, with their lack of sense and compassion, seem to be in any position to act on their cruel fantasies. Lucky for us, many of the tough decisions in the real world are being made by people like Judge Watters.

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• Last of Kapsa dogs placed in homes