ELYRIA, Ohio — An investigation into possible animal neglect is underway in Lorain County one week after several dogs were found attacking one of their own.
All seven of the bulldog mixes were in poor condition, and humane officers are working to identify the owner.
Most of the dogs are currently being kept at Friendship Animal Protective League in Elyria. Executive Director Greg Willey became aware of the dogs last Tuesday night, when he got a call from Lorain police about several dogs fighting in the street.
Authorities got the call from neighbors and Angelina Baker, who was driving by Washington Avenue and 29th Street when she saw several dogs chewing on something. She was horrified when she realized it was another dog, and she jumped out of her car and began kicking them away.
"It was just one of the saddest things I had ever seen," Baker said. "The smell was disgusting. You could smell the blood in the air from the attack happening."
Baker said some of the dogs eventually turned on her.
"So I got back in my car. I was trying to bump them or nudge them to get them off her, laying on my horn and just waiting for the police to come," she recalled. "It was really traumatic. I was not OK for the next couple of hours. I did not sleep that night."
Baker says when police arrived, they helped scatter the dogs with their baton. Willey arrived later that night and transported the dog that was attacked to a clinic.
"[It was] pretty nasty when we arrived," Willey told 3News. "I had pools of blood in my car. Her legs were completely swollen, covered with bite wounds across her face neck and around her legs."
But somehow, the dog — since named Martha — survived. She is now staying at a medical foster home, and Baker couldn't have been happier when she learned the news.
"I truly just felt like I was meant to be there," she said. "I was meant to see that, because it didn't appear to me that other people were stopping to help."
The six other bulldog mixes — four males and two females between 1 and 4 years old — were taken to Friendship APL, where Willey and his team discovered all of them had other kinds of injuries. Those included sores, malnourishment, cherry eye, and signs that they had been living in their filth.
"Most of these dogs, they show signs very consistent with neglect," Vickie McDOnald, who works as a humane officer at Friendship APL, stated. "You can see on their paw pads they do have some raw areas, some red areas where their paw pads appear burned or skin is sluffing off. They also have ulcerated areas like that on their genitals and their underside. That's very consistent with sitting in urine."
McDonald says the intent is to eventually adopt the dogs out, but they were still working to identify the owner of the dogs as the team at the humane society works to nurse all of them back to health.
"When we just find a dog outside in poor condition, there's a lot of questions we need to figure out and find answers to before we proceed with anything like criminal charges," McDonald added.
As the for the fight that started in the street, Willey says there are a number of things that could have contributed to it, including the possibility that the dogs have spent most of the lives inside.
"What we assume — having dealt with all the dogs now — is that this was maybe overstimulation, overexcitement. They didn't know what was going on," he said. "The dogs just got stressed and stressed and responded negatively to that stress, because the dogs do all seem, relatively speaking, to be very nice and very friendly and outgoing."