St. Croix residents are waiting for lab reports on a substance found in a dog owner’s yard that may have poisoned five dogs and a cat in Estate Carlton last weekend. Only one dog survived.
If the material is identified as poison, police can work to discover if it was an accidental or intentional act.
Last Friday night, Jason Walker’s dog Princess came running in the house and began foaming at the mouth and convulsing. Shortly afterwards, she died.
The next morning, a neighbor messaged Walker that she found a dead dog in her yard and couldn’t find her own dog. A little later she came upon her dog, also dead. A third neighbor reported his dog just expired. They began to suspect poisoning.
Walker carried two of the neighbors’ dead dogs along with his dog, Mortimer, who began showing symptoms, to St. Croix veterinarian Kasey Canton, who kept the pooch over the weekend. He flushed the dog’s system with a charcoal solution and kept him on a sedative drip to prevent convulsions. Canton said he was keeping the other two dogs in case an autopsy needs to be done to determine how they died.
“There was a suspicious material in the yard that didn’t belong there,” Canton said.
Mortimer recovered, but on Monday, a dead cat was found in the neighborhood.
After searching their yards Saturday, the friends came across a cut up gallon milk container that no one recognized, with the remains of a suspicious liquid.
“The dogs drug it from someplace or it was dropped in the yard,” Walker guessed. After talking, no one could think of why anyone would intentionally poison the dogs.
The container was taken to Bethany Bradford, veterinarian with the V.I. Department of Agriculture. She said very little of the substance remained in the container, “just some flakes,” but it smelled like food, perhaps fish. The results of the lab tests will take about a week, according to Bradford.
