Someone is leaving meat laced with poison at a heavily used walking trail in Carkeek park in Seattle. On Saturday, a two-year-old Golden Retriever, Berdy, got sick after eating a chunk of meat stuffed with pellets. Other walkers also found chunks with laced meat and took photos.
We were terrified,” Berdy’s owner Kyle Barker told KOMO News. “We were concerned that the poison might act quickly.”
It happened at the end of their hike, when Kyle said his dog found some meat on the trail and started gobbling it up. Kyle grabbed his dog and took the meat out of his mouth. He didn’t think much of the incident until other hikers came up to him with several photos of laced meat that they had found on trail that morning.
Kyle and his wife, Allyson, suspecting the worst, quickly took Berdy to Greenlake Animal Hospital, where the vet took an X-ray and discovered green pellets in his stomach.
“I think this intent is malicious,” Dr. Jeb Mortimer told KOMO News. “There’s meat with some sort of toxic packed in it laying next to the trail. Someone’s trying to kill dogs in my opinion.”
The vet induced vomiting in Berdy, and the dog seems to be doing fine. The vet said that depending on the kind of poison, symptoms of illness can develop within 12 hours, days, or even weeks. The pellets have been sent to a Washington State University lab for testing.
“I don’t know who would dislike dogs so much that they’d do something like this,” Kyle said, “and take a member away from someone’s family.”
Kyle suspects that the man responsible may have been out on the trail at the same time they were, given that Berdy only found the meat on the way back. He thinks the meat was put there after Berdy had already passed the area earlier that morning.
The hikers who caught up with Kyle and showed him the photos of the tainted meat on the trail said they remembered seeing a suspicious person, but they didn’t confront him.
“I hope they’re caught and I hope it’s put to an end,” said Allyson. “No one should have to go through the worry we went through.”
Via KOMO News
