Money, crime and a crumbling infrastructure aren’t the only things the city of Detroit has to worry about.
Packs of wild, abandoned dogs are now taking over the city, leaving officials worried about how to handle the problem, which presents both animal rights and safety concerns. It is being reported that roughly 50,000 are without homes at this point.
“It was almost post-apocalyptic, where there are no businesses, nothing except people in houses and dogs running around,” the Humane Society of the United States director Amanda Arrington told Bloomberg News about a recent visit to Detroit. “The suffering of animals goes hand in hand with the suffering of people.”
Bloomberg reports that packs of the dogs have been spotted in groups as large as 20. In one case, Detroit police officer Lapez Moore said the city’s animal-control unit recently found several of the dogs inside a flooded basement where thieves had torn out the building’s water pipes.
“The dogs were having a pool party,” Moore said. “We went in and fished them out.”
But the puppy party isn’t as cute as it sounds. The reality is that local shelters have to euthanize about 70 percent of the dogs that are brought in because there isn’t room enough to keep all of the strays.
And when not taken into shelters, the dogs are a threat to any and everybody on the streets of Detroit. Most of the breeds that are abandoned are pit bulls or mixed breeds.
The city says there were 903 reported dog bites last year, including a woman who had her scalp bitten off by two strays.
Attacks have become so prevalent that the U.S. Postal Service has temporarily halted delivery to some of Detroit’s neighborhoods after 25 carriers reported being bitten by dogs from October 2012 through July 2013, the story notes.
In a truly bizarre development, mail carrier Catherine Guzik said she was attacked by “swarms of tiny, ferocious dogs” while on the job.
“It’s like Chihuahuaville,” she said.
But in a city with not much money to spare, solutions are difficult to come to.
A number of private organizations have stepped in to address the issue with plans to create a no-kill shelter to house some of the animals. But in the meantime, residents and city officials say they are at a loss for a viable solution to bring the situation under control.
Wow. We hope they can get this issue under control for the safety of both the animals and the residents in Detroit.
SOURCE: Yahoo
