Updated 8:30 a.m. Feb. 28 with information from Adam Morck, who wrote to us hours after the original article came out with some clarifications.
When an Alabama couple came out of their home to find their minivan with its bumper torn apart and blood, scratch marks, and dents all over the exterior, they were stunned. They’d been packing for a fishing trip, and now it looked like a madman had set upon their vehicle.
“I saw the Dodge symbol [lying on the ground] and then turned and looked and saw the carnage,” said Emily Morck, on FoxToledo.
“We thought maybe a disgruntled former employee of mine might’ve done something crazy,” Adam Morck said.
They called 911. Adam Morck said investigators checked out all the damage, including some odd paw prints and bite marks. “[The investigator] looked up like a deer caught in the headlights and said, ‘Guys, I think a dog did this.” According to animal control, the perpetrators were two dogs, and they were after at least one of the Morcks’ cats, who was hiding under the van’s hood.
That cat ran away and hasn’t been seen since the Saturday night incident. The couple’s other cat ran up a tree and stayed there. When firefighters showed up to help get him down, he just went higher up the tree.
Adam Morck, who contacted Dogster to fill us in on the details, says animal control told him the the dogs who attacked were a pair of escaped pit bull-mastiffs who broke free from their owners when left tied up by a rope at the nearby hospital. “There was a white one which remains at large, and a red-brown one which they hit with a tranq gun, but he ran away unfazed and they didn’t catch him. The police have not yet given us their names, but once the dogs are captured we will be requesting DNA samples to validate the dogs and make sure appropriate parties are held responsible,” he wrote.
“The pit bulls were human shy and wearing sharp pointed collars, so animal control suspects they were captive bred fighting dogs — which would explain why they’d be capable of doing the damage they did while going after my cat. I have seen a ‘busted’ fighting dog farm years ago, and these poor animals are kept on the brink of starvation at all times to keep them lean and rabidlike at all times.”
He hopes the owners come forward, help find their dogs, and take responsibility. “My primary concern is that no human or other animals are harmed while these now wild dogs are running loose in downtown Foley,” Morck wrote.
Poor kitties. It’s a sad situation all the way around. If the story is as the animal control staffers tell it, the dogs probably weren’t in the the best of circumstances either.
I originally wrote the story thinking it was the couple’s own pooch who did something odd, and it was a semi-lighthearted “ha-ha, dogs are accused of eating homework, now they’re accused of eating minivans” post. But now that I have the facts, it’s no longer amusing.
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