In Springside, a couple died, and their dogs ate their remains until the bodies were discovered. It's a sad story all around, but now we have to figure out what to do with the seven dogs that lived in the home. Currently, the dogs are in the Saskatoon SPCA being assessed for their health and adoptability, but there's a question of whether anyone would be willing to take them in.
There has been a knee-jerk reaction among many people that the dogs should be immediately put down. The thrust of their argument is that the dogs ate people, which is true, but it ignores the circumstances around the incident. The dogs didn't kill the people involved from all reports, and they were without food for at least a week. A complete lack of food will drive any living creature to eat what does exist, and even people have been forced to eat other people when they ran out of other alternatives. Dogs are no different, and the empty house caused them to go for the only food source which did exist. Unfortunately, that source was their late owners.
Now, those calling for the dogs to be put down immediately are being influenced more by the horror of the event than they are by the behavior of the dogs themselves. They see an animal that has eaten a person, and assume that it will want to eat more people in the future. Whether that's the case or not depends on the animal itself, and the Saskatoon SPCA says that these dogs have not been a problem with those assigned to them. This is not to say that the dogs won't have some problems overall, Tiffiny Koback with the SPCA says that socialization and confidence are issues, but there's no indication that their experience has turned them into dangerous animals.
Koback also says that there have been similar cases in the past, and at least one dog has gone on to live a happy and violence-free life after, so it's not out of the question that these dogs will also be able to join a new family without issue. While adopting these animals would be a much more difficult task due to their history, they could otherwise be healthy and happy companions for the most part.
They also forget that a dead person and a living person are different things. While a dog might never consider eating its owner as they live, when they die many changes take place to make the body less identifiable as the owner. The way the body looks, and more importantly, the way it smells, changes completely, and the sensations a dog associates with its owner would gradually disappear. It's not something most people would be willing to consider, but what the dog saw after a week might not have been their owner at all. I know of dogs who have brought home bones of dead animals, but would not attack their living equivalents. It's because the dead animal and the living are different things to the dog.
It's a somewhat sad sight to see people willing to punish an animal merely for surviving, rather than actually giving it a chance to prove it can still live normally and become part of a new home. Yes, if the dogs prove violent as a result of the incident, they would need to be put down, and that's unfortunate. However, if the animals are not violent and can become normal, happy dogs again, what's the harm in allowing that to happen?
