Going to the dogs
Wild dog packs terrorize area

ABOVE: Gary Langston pauses while trekking the backcountry with his horse and his chocolate Lab. The dog was later attacked and killed by a pack of wild dogs in the Vanderwagen area. [courtesy photo] BELOW: Five or six dogs attacked 5-year-old Mathias Pablo Tuesday evening August, 14, 2007 at his home in Twin Lakes, NM. Pablo was attacked while going to wash up for dinner. He spent that evening in the hospital on heavy pain medications, but was sent home later that evening. [file photo]
By Bill Donovan
Staff writer

GALLUP — Gary Langston still gets tears in his eyes remembering the day last March when a pack of wild dogs in the Vanderwagen area attacked his two dogs and severely injured one of them.

While one dog managed to escape, a Labrador retriever named Chocolate was clawed at and nearly killed by the pack, saved only by the fact that the person Langston was visiting managed to kill two of the dogs and chase the others away.

This was Chocolate’s first experience with “extreme violence,” Langston said, and it would eventually prove to be fatal.

Chocolate was a dog that had been by Langston’s side for much of the past 13 years, traveling with him when he went on photography assignments or being his companion when he lived his daily life in Gallup. Chocolate has even been the subject of magazine articles.

“Chocolate didn’t deserve this,” Langston said recently, adding that he heard from his vet that his trusted companion had died four weeks later.

A senseless death, but one that is far from uncommon in this area, as the number of wild and feral dogs has been increasing rapidly in many parts of McKinley County and on the Navajo Reservation.

Two years ago, animal control officials on the Navajo Reservation reported that wild dogs were a problem in every part of the reservation with numerous reports each month of wild dogs killing sheep, goats and calves, as well as pets.

There have been dozens of cases each year of children being treated for dog bites, many of them after coming in contact with wild dogs that stray into the small Navajo communities looking for food.

In McKinley County, animal control officials reported that there have been five or six cases of children being bitten by wild dogs in just the past month.

Romie Calderon, who has been an animal control officer for the Gallup program for the past nine years, said his office receives reports almost on a daily basis of wild dogs in some part of the county.

The problem he and other county animal control officials face is jurisdictional. They hear a report, go and investigate and then find out that the dogs have run away and are now on reservation land, outside their jurisdiction.

So they contact the Navajo Nation, which has only a handful of animal control officers to patrol an area the size of West Virginia. By the time, animal control officers show up, the dogs are either long gone or the description was so vague that officers now have a hard time determining which dogs the original complaint was against.

The fact that Langston’s dog was attacked in the Vanderwagen area didn’t surprise animal control officials.

And even if the wild dog population there could be eradicated, animal control officials know it would shortly resume because the underlying problem isn’t the dogs but humans.

It is humans who leave the dogs out or dump them in remote areas because they are no longer cute puppies or they have become a bother. Without someone to care for them, the dogs become feral and join other dogs who have also been abandoned. They become a pack and as a pack, they usually become more vicious and dangerous to all those around them.

McKinley County and the Navajo Nation isn’t alone with this problem.

A report by the National Geographic two years ago reported that the U.S. is facing a “feral dog crisis” with packs of dogs roaming low-income neighborhoods in cities like Los Angeles, St. Louis, New York, Santa Fe, Pittsburgh and Cleveland. The situation has become so bad in some parts of Detroit that the postmaster there has threatened to stop the delivery of mail to those areas until the dog problem is under control.

Most parts of Gallup don’t have a problem, Calderon said, because people report roaming dogs and they’ll picked up. However, in areas like Red Hills Trailer Park, residents are so close to the reservation that wild dog packs have been known to visit the park in search of food.

And while people talk about the economic losses from the feral dogs — some $50 million a year nationwide according to one estimate — the real loss can’t be measured, said Trinni Jensen, a veterinarian’s wife who has seen countless dog owners come to the Red Rock Animal Clinic with dogs or other pets that have been attacked by feral dogs.

“We’re able to save a lot of them,” she said, but in many cases, the attack is so vicious and the pet’s health is so fragile that there’s little a veterinarian can do.

There’s also, she said, not a lot a pet owner can do to protect their pets from wild dogs except to make sure that they have all of their shots in case they are attacked.

“Fencing is about the only way to keep feral dogs from your pets,” she said.