A Dog Hoarder In Arkansas Died An Untimely Death — Then The Dogs Devoured Her
ARNewsWhen police found the woman’s body, she had over 50 malnourished and aggressive dogs living on the property.
Sometimes, too much of a good thing can be a bad thing, as evidenced by a 65-year-old woman from Arkansas who, at one point, kept over 100 dogs on her property.
As reported by The Huffington Post, Van Buren County Animal Control Director Reta Tharp said that in 2012, animal control had to remove 103 dogs from the woman’s property. It was easier that time, she said, because the woman was alive to help.
When they found her dead in November 2015, however, it was chaos.
The woman had suffered from Hepatitis C, and it led to her sudden death one day that autumn. At the time, she had over 50 dogs on the property, many of whom were malnourished and aggressive — a veterinarian at the scene was bitten.
“The deputy had to shoot some of them that day in order to get into the house,” Tharp said. “They had never been vaccinated for anything. The dogs were inbred, some of them were sick. Just, mountains of issues. It was just a situation I don’t want to go through again.”
After the initial discovery, authorities were advised by the state’s health department to return to the property and euthanize an additional 26 of the dogs in the interest of public health and safety.
“We did all that we can do to protect the community,” Tharp said. “There are neighbors in that area. There are children. The dogs were starting to wander into their yards.”
Only eight dogs remained afterward, either waiting to be put down or captured and reconditioned.
Authorities were also unable to identify where, exactly, all the dogs had come from in the first place. “She just took them in,” Tharp said, “and before you knew it, it was out of hand.”
According to the ASPCA, there are 900 to 2,000 new cases of animal hoarding each year in the United States, involving nearly 250,000 animals.
