Navajo Nation Over Whelmed With Wild Dog

When dogs are left to roam or are abandoned in the wild they form as groups of wild pack dogs, so out it the Navajo Nation things have really gotten out of hand with these dogs.

Kevin Gleason who is the Wildlife and Animal Control Manage said there are as many as four hundred and forty five thousand dogs on the reservation. Kevin also said: They kill everything, Cats, dogs, cattle, sheep and horses. We’ve also had people severely injured by them. We’ve had people with horrendous bites. We just had a case where a man lost thirty seven sheep to a pack of dogs. We have that going on all the time. Our officers respond to more than twenty five bite cases a month, and twenty five livestock damage cases a month.

Virginia Ravndal who started the Lakota Animal Care Project said: We don’t have a big problem with attacks on people, although we do occasionally have dogs that are hungry and will pack up and kill young livestock. Probably a bigger issue for us is disease, starvation and freezing. Mange is a huge problem. And going into South Dakota winters without hair, a lot of dogs don’t make it.

The article goes on to say how many of the tribes people are too poor to afford the proper vet care or even to be able to feed the dogs, which has become a serious concern with all these dogs roaming around and attacking their live stock.

So have the wild dogs taken over the reservation ?

Read the article by Jeri Clausing here.