Packs of wild dogs may be played for laughs in Hollywood movies, but in Riverside County, they’re no joke.
Groups of canines have slain livestock near Anza and, in 2018, killed a woman “in broad daylight,” according to a report in the Los Angeles Times.
“Earlier this spring, a pack of free-roaming hounds — identified as three Labrador mixes, two Queensland blue heelers and a husky — slaughtered a herd of goats and two sheep,” the Times reports.
The Valley News also reports that “dozens of goats were killed by dogs … near Anza’s Hamilton Schools” last year.
The Riverside County Department of Animal Services is working to combat the canines by “bringing a spay-neuter bus to the region, providing occasional vaccination and educational clinics, and urging people to keep their pets indoors and behind fences,” the Times says, but “it only takes a few bad actors — and a couple of breeding seasons — for problems to get out of control again.”
Those “bad actors” include pet owners who come to Anza to dump their dogs, which animal control officer Harvey Beck knows for a fact because “he’s found several suburban and urban animals identified through microchips.”
“Look around you,” Beck told Times reporter Susanne Rust. “What better place to do something like that? You just pull up, open the door, and kick out the dog.”