Fourteen dogs involved in a fatal attack on a teenager in rural Saline County have been put down as an investigation into what prompted the incident goes forward.
Matt Thibault, a spokesman for the city of Benton, said four dogs were left behind Wednesday afternoon because they were inside kennels in a house near Alexander. The house appears to have been serving as a makeshift rescue center or shelter, he said.
Saline County doesn’t have an animal control office, so Benton’s officers stepped in to collect the dogs, a group of pitbulls, pitbull mixes and hounds, after the attack at about 12:15 p.m., Thibault said.
“It’s one of those horrible situations,” Thibault said. “This had all the best of intentions, and it turned into the worst nightmare for everybody involved.”
The attack happened while the girl was in a fenced piece of private property off White Oak Drive that contained about 30 dogs she had been helping with, the Saline County Sheriff’s office said. The identity of the girl had not been released as of Thursday morning.
The sheriff’s office did not immediately respond to messages Thursday morning.
Preston Noland, who works with Southern Hearts Rescue in Bauxite, posted to Facebook that the shelter was called in to help remove other dogs from the home at the corner of Cherylwood Road and White Oak Drive in Alexander. It appears the dogs were dumped at the end of a dead end street and people who lived there were trying to help with a bad situation, Noland wrote.
The dogs were not part of a fighting ring and weren’t trained to fight, Noland said. Instead, the situation developed into what Noland called “unintentional hoarders,” who tried to help abandoned animals in an area with no official animal shelter.
“Good-hearted people saw the problem and were assisting with it,” Noland said. “These were dogs she had interacted with before.”
Once Benton Animal Control took the dogs involved in the attack, other rescues stepped in to take some of the dogs, Noland said.
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