Yup, packs of wild dogs once "terrorized" North Carolina
Last month, a gang of roaming canines presented a big problem in a small town. Weird? Not if you go back and read literally any newspaper from the early and mid 20th century.
Last week, I was reminded of one of my favorite clips from Talladega Nights:
First, it is my duty to remind you that I was in this movie.1
Second, this line, “We want to talk about something serious: Packs of stray dogs that control most of the major cities,” is so ridiculous that Will Ferrell and John C. Reilly can’t get through it. They try again. They fail again.
It’s funny! Except when it’s true. Here’s a snippet of a story from last month, when a gang of dogs descended upon a small North Carolina town:
The Scotland Neck Police Department is warning people about a pack of dogs that has been on the loose and terrorizing people and pets in town for several weeks.
Go on.
Dusty Sprouse called the dogs cute, but menacing. “They killed all of our chickens,” he said. “We had five and that was like five and that was the day it went all over the news that egg prices were going up.”
Correlation, causation, what’s the difference?
There is some good news: Animal control captured the alpha male, a Pit mix that had joined a pack of 6 or 7 dogs that had been roaming around town for years and made them more aggressive. “The situation began with dogs rummaging through trash and wrecking abandoned houses,” Scotland Neck’s police chief, Tommy Parker told WITN-TV. “Eventually, the dogs started staying in town more and it became clear they were chasing after pets, leading to multiple attacks on them.”
The story made national news because it seems preposterous. Wild dogs!2 Roaming in packs! Terrorizing the populace! And yet, generations ago, gangs of feral canines were enough of an actual threat in North Carolina and elsewhere that their mere presence made front page news over and over again.
I mean, get a load of this headline from The Raleigh Times on September 6, 1898:
The story goes on to say that the dog had killed 35 chickens, referred to it as a “monster,” and called the man who shot it a hero. This story was not an outlier. Packs of wild dogs were semi-regularly in the headlines through the 1970s. So what happened? Why aren’t we constantly under assault from street-toughened dachshunds and Great Danes to this day?
Let’s go WAY back here. First there were wolves. At some point, tens of thousands of years ago, wolves (and then dogs) became friendlier with humans, and then humans trained the dogs to do things. To hunt. To patrol. To pull sleds.
In the United States, those dogs and other domestic animals have long been awarded some sort of protection, going back to Massachusetts in 1641. In the 19th century, abolitionists and people involved in the temperance movement thought that the treatment of dogs was a reflection of the morality of people. Enslavers abused them, they said. Abolitionists cared for them. The ASPCA, the first American humane society, was founded in 1866. The movement tended to be driven by upper-class elites. More people started to get dogs as pets. As modern medicine evolved, people and pets lived longer, and closer to each other.
However! There was another issue. People would abandon dogs. They’d leave them behind after hunts. They’d dump them on the side of the road. Those dogs would find other dogs, form packs, and then go out and try to find food, shelter, or doggie love. They’d have puppies. And the pack would grow. Feral dogs rarely went after humans, but in western North Carolina they killed deer. (In Wilkes County in the late 1960s, officials mused that dogs killed more deer than hunters.) In the east, they killed livestock. As a result, farmers would just shoot them. In Stanly County, a few teenagers got lavished with praise for killing four dogs that slaughtered a goat in 1960. In 1967, a reporter from the Rocky Mount Telegram went on a dog hunt in Nash County, where local dog wardens staked out a farm where a pack had attacked some cows the night before. They bagged three puppies. The reporter felt bad at first—he hadn’t expected the wild dogs to look like … pets. But then one snarled at him and seemed to be foaming at the mouth. He felt differently after that.
For decades, there had also been “mad dog” scares across North Carolina, where dozens of dogs were rounded up and killed to keep from spreading rabies. This gave rise to the dog catcher, whose job was often funded by pet licensing fees, as well as the fees owners had to pay to get their rounded-up pets back from the pound. In some places, the more dogs they caught, the more money a dog catcher would make. Capitalism! It did seem to work, though. Gradually, packs of feral dogs started to disappear in more urban areas, even as dog catchers themselves became more and more unpopular. In 1927, Asheville’s dog catcher was fired after he clubbed an animal to death in view of the public. In 1962, a dog owner in Raleigh asked a judge if the constitutional rights of his neighborhood’s pets were being violated by dog catchers who were “enticing and entrapping” their pets.3 There seemed to be different rules and social norms for urban areas than in rural ones, where farmers did whatever it took to make sure their livestock wouldn’t be killed.
Gradually, cities and counties got their act together. In 1967, the General Assembly first passed a law that made it illegal to leave a domesticated animal on the side of the highway in some places. Over time, they also made it illegal for people to allow their dogs to roam at night. There’s another law which, well, I’ll just let you read it:
If any person owning or having any bitch4 shall knowingly permit her to run at large during the erotic stage of copulation he shall be guilty of a Class 3 misdemeanor.
More and more local cities and counties started requiring a number of vaccines for dogs, and banned them from running free at any time. Many also required leashes, mostly to make it clear which dogs were pets and which ones were on the loose. In all, it was put on the owner to control where their dogs went and how they multiplied. Hence, beginning in 1979, Bob Barker ended every episode of The Price is Right with a plea to get your dog spayed or neutered to help control the pet population.
But even with the new laws, the people who were enforcing them remained unpopular. I mean, just take a look at this clip from “The Shaggy D.A.” (1976) and tell me who you’re rooting for here:
The terms “dog catcher” and “pound” presented a P.R. problem. So cities and counties started using names like “animal control/humane officer” and “animal shelter” instead, and even some of those terms have fallen out of favor. In 2021, when Guilford County replaced its dingy 50-year-old animal shelter with a new fence-less facility, it called it the Animal Resource Center. “I want our community to look at us as a resource,” the animal resources director told WGHP-TV. “We are in the people business.”
As a result of all of this, stories about wild dogs really began to disappear by the late 1970s. There were still occasional reports of dog packs roaming the woods, but they were mostly in rural areas, and seemed to be blamed on folks in the country just letting their pets run free. The last piece of North Carolina wild dog hysteria I could find seems to be by an outdoors columnist from Rocky Mount in 1991, who stated that nobody should go into the woods unarmed, and that people should shoot any collarless dogs they encountered there. Say, that’s illegal!
Today, when packs of roaming dogs actually do show up somewhere (mostly around farms or in rural areas) they’re trapped or tranquilized, not shot5. Which means today, when “wild dogs” make headlines, they’re seen as a curiosity, not part of an ongoing national scourge. Before February, the last story I saw on this topic was from 2020, when a pack of feral dogs killed 11 goats near Fayetteville.
So no, packs of stray dogs do not, in fact, control most of our major cities. They don’t even control our minor cities! That’s true for Scotland Neck, which now seems to have an upper hand on its roaming dog problem. After all, it’s been through an animal invasion before, but that’s a story for another day.
It me:
Yes, I know there’s a difference between “wild” dogs, “feral” dogs, and “stray” dogs, but I’m using the terms a little interchangeably here, so forgive me. I’m also not touching on feral cats, which are a whole ‘nother issue. And no, this wasn’t merely a North Carolina problem. Folks worldwide were dealing with this! Still, it seems that the United States has gotten a handle on it, while other cities internationally still have “street dogs.”
In this case, the judge sympathized with dogs but urged the owner to either get a leash or get rid of the dog. Now, I’m not a lawyer, but pets are still seen mostly as property, although some laws make it illegal to do certain things to any animal, regardless of whether they have owners. That said, you’re technically allowed to do whatever you want to a possum in North Carolina for five days a year. Please don’t.
I feel the need here to point out that the term “bitch” here refers to a female dog, and this is the only place in the entire North Carolina General Statues where that term appears. Also I’ve been a little bit desensitized to the term. My late grandmother was huge in the dog show circuit, and would often hold up one of her Japanese chins for me while saying something to the effect of “Isn’t this just the cutest little bitch?”
However! 30 to 50 feral hogs present a different problem with a different solution.
When I was in junior high school in the early 1970's, we lived a mile or so from the Greensboro, NC city dump. There were a lot of feral cats that lived at the dump, as well as a pack of feral dogs that lived in the surrounding woods. I would hunt small game in those woods when the dump was closed and often saw the "wild dogs" in a pack of around twenty animals. I remember they were lead at that time by a big Saint Bernard, but they all looked like they were once someone's pet and were in all sizes and breeds. There was an old farmstead next to the dump that the city owned, and I think the dogs took shelter in the outbuildings. I remember checking out the buildings once and heard the "pack" coming. Even though I was armed, I ran for my life, and they finally gave up the chase. I never investigated the farmstead again. I think I remember hearing about animal control trapping and shooting the dogs not much later, due to them attacking livestock and people's pets.
I may be flying solo here but as a dog lover, this piece bummed me the hell out! The Talladega clip is always gold though