Thought you'd be interested in this article: "Stray reservation dogs blamed for attacks".That is an interesting facet of life in New Mexico! Life on the Rez continues on its usual sad and chaotic path!
Back when I was a kid in Corrales, New Mexico, dog control was much looser than it is now. We saw and experienced some seriously-dreadful stuff. Like the day, when I was about nine years old, when the neighbor's dog was in heat, which attracted three dogs belonging to the other neighbor. These three dogs - two Dobermans and a little yippee dog - began crowding together and growling at each other. We kids started to intervene to separate the dogs. Then, the two Dobermans turned on the little yippee dog, and simply killed it in front of us. Violent, brutal death in three seconds. If these dogs would do this to their own housemate, what wouldn't they do to us? Witnessing this at close range, we kids reconsidered our plan to intervene, and headed indoors instead.
There was still an element of danger in Corrales when I was young. I had my share of dog bites, as many kids did. It made me shy around some dogs, particularly German Shepherds, or, God forbid, those Dobermans.
So, having grown up around it, I recognize the signs of trouble. For example, debarking from the cruise ship last November and walking seaside in Mazatlan, I saw loose dogs in the neighborhoods bordering the beach, and changed direction to avoid them. They displayed no animosity, and 99.9% of the time they would be fine, I'm sure, but it's that 0.1% of the time you worry about.
The Rez is its own place, and it operates by older rules:
On the vast Navajo Nation, wildlife and animal control manager Kevin Gleason estimates there are four to five dogs for each of the more than 89,000 households — or as many as 445,000 dogs, most of which roam unchecked, killing livestock and biting people with alarming regularity.
"They kill everything," Gleason said in a recent interview. "Cats, dogs, cattle, sheep, 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 37 sheep to a pack of dogs.
"We have that going on all the time. Our officers respond to more than 25 bite cases a month, and 25 livestock damage cases a month."
...Animal rescue groups say dog overpopulation is a problem on most reservations.
...Polis pointed to a project on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota as an example of a progressive community-based effort to stem unwanted breeding.
"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," said Virginia Ravndal, who started the Lakota Animal Care Project. "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."
..."You can't just go in and say your animal has to be spayed and neutered. You really have to develop a relationship," she said.
She has also developed a kids program called Shunka Scouts (shunka means dog in Lakota), in which children can interact with animals and earn "acts of kindness badges" that help teach them basics of animal care. Part of the message: "Animals are our relations and no one should go hungry, no one should go cold, no one should be sick."
...When the project started, she said people who could no longer care for a starving or freezing dog would call and say, "'Can you shoot the dog for us.' Now they call and say, 'Can you help us find it a home.'"
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