This is a bizarre and sad story from the Native American Times about dogs and death.

“You look at the Sundance area where that gentleman was killed, we went in and removed 79 dogs after that and it looked like we never touched it,” Gleason said.

Dogs roam the sides of highways, restaurant, gas station and store parking lots and just about anywhere else they might find food. Their carcasses in various stages of decomposition litter spots along the sides of the main roads and interstates.

After Gleason added the animal control operations to his duties in October, he said he ordered his officers to conduct a series of roundups. Between October and April, he said officers picked up 2,332 dogs. Of those, only 79 were adopted and 313 were released back to their owners. The rest were euthanized. The roundups were cancelled shortly after that, he said, “because we ran out of money.”

Uh… good morning?

Brend an Kiley has worked as a child actor in New Orleans, as a member of the junior press corps at the 1988 Republican National Convention, and, for one happy April, as a bootlegger’s assistant in Nicaragua....

10 replies on “The Navajo Nation’s Dog Problem”

  1. You white men have much to answer for! Now native Americans are neglecting dogs due to your centuries of murder and oppression.

  3. Yikes. Met a guy at the dog park who had adopted a dog imported from the streets of Da Nang. If there’s a program rescuing street dogs from Vietnam – why not one (or more) from the Res in the U.S.?

  6. Shh, don’t tell Dan about this. If the Navajo rez is like the Yakima rez, then I’m sure a-lot of those dogs are pits and pit mixes. Please, don’t tell Savage, he might santorum himself!

  8. My ex is didadaht. The first time I visited the rez, I inquired why there were fences as high as 15ft around the houses. Were the rottweilers and pits really aggressive? I was then informed that the fences were to keep cougars from running off with the dogs.
    Not all all reservations are the same.

  9. I once had a Lakota roommate who was adamant that my third roommate not spay his cat because it would interfere with her reproductive rights. (Kitty was spayed while he was out of town and couldn’t protest). Same roommate’s family on Pine Ridge was dirt poor but still had 12+ dogs running rampant about their home and land. The article’s author is right–it will take a lot of time, energy, (a big one) money, and trust to convince many people that it’s better in the long term for res dogs to be fixed and vaccinated.

Comments are closed.