Tijana Clarke is worried that someone wants to harm her dogs.
That may or may not be the case, but with potentially tainted chunks of meat being tossed into her yard, the Creighton resident is understandably disturbed.
Last month, on Jan. 14, Clarke let her two small dogs, Jonesey and Kennedy, out in her front yard. They were drawn to a particular spot and began digging in the snow.
“That’s odd for them because they’re out all the time and they don’t do that,” she said.
“It’s their yard. They go out, they play, they do their business, they come in. They don’t stop and sniff and dig unless something is there.”
When Jonesey began biting at the snow, Clarke discovered what had caught her interest: three wiener-like pieces of meat, frozen together.
She retrieved the meat with a pooper scooper and placed it in a Ziploc bag, but not before Jonesey had consumed small pieces of it.
Clarke was apprehensive, but as her husband pointed out, the meat could have been left in the yard by a crow.
“I thought, well, you know, we’ll just be really careful in the front yard,” she said.
Jonesey subsequently developed an upset stomach and required medication from a veterinarian. Did the meat cause the illness? Clarke can’t say for sure.
A little over two weeks later, on Jan. 30, Kennedy was in the front yard when she darted toward a particular spot and began flinging around an unknown object.
Clarke thought it might have been a dead bird, but it was another piece of wiener, not yet frozen.
She checked the meat for crow claw marks and found none. Like the first cluster of pieces, this single chunk of meat looked normal on the outside but carried a sour, off smell.
“It was very suspicious. Then that was it. We were angry,” Clarke said. “Who is coming into our yard? Why are they trying to do this? And if the meat isn’t poisonous, why are they trying to bait foxes and coyotes into our yard? It’s odd.”
As was the case on Jan. 14, Clarke found no footprints indicating someone had set foot on her property. The meat had been tossed into her yard.
She took all of the pieces of meat to the RCMP and told them what had happened.
“It doesn’t belong,” Clarke said. “Like the police officer said, it was totally out of your everyday [occurrence]. It’s alarming.”
She said the police did not tell her of meat being tossed into other dog owners’ yards, but they encouraged her to go public as a warning to other people.
Clarke said the meat has been turned over to conservation officers, who planned to have it tested for toxic additives.
In North America and beyond, there have been multiple reported cases of people using tainted meat to harm dogs in other people’s yards.
Last year, for example, someone used meat scraps containing strychnine, a toxin found in rat poison, to target dogs in Whitehorse, according to CBC. Two of the dogs died.
In another case from 2015, meat laced with rat poison killed a dog in a fenced-in yard in Arlington, Wisconsin, WISC-TV reported on its website.
If the tests on the meat from her yard come back clean, Clarke said it is clear to her that someone is trying to bait foxes and coyotes into her yard so they will go after her dogs.
Carmen Ward, manager of the Flin Flon, Creighton and Area SPCA shelter, where Clarke works, found the story unsettling.
“I find it very disturbing that suspicious meat was found in Tijana’s yard,” she said. “The thought of someone wanting to physically harm an animal with possibly tainted meat is frightening. Not only could her dogs be harmed, but what about the wildlife that is more than likely going to scavenge the meat first?”
Clarke now wonders whether the meat was in fact the first time someone may have tried to harm her dogs.
Last spring she recalled finding three pieces of neatly cut fish stacked in her back yard. At the time she wondered if crows had left them there.
Clarke wonders whether her work for the SPCA, which looks out for the welfare of animals in the region, has angered someone intent on exacting revenge.
“Through [the SPCA], sometimes you don’t make friends,” she said. “In order to save the animal, sometimes you need to make an enemy of the human.”
Clarke now rakes the section of her yard her dogs utilize. She has also dug up snow in search of more meat, but has yet to find any.
