Comments (0) | |

Saturday, Oct. 17, 2009

East Dublin man with nearly 100 dogs arrested

A police raid revealed deplorable living conditions for nearly 100 dogs at a five-acre tract in East Dublin on Thursday, but investigators found no evidence of a dogfighting ring.

Monty Loyd, 45, who kept most of the more than 90 pit bull and mixed-breed dogs chained to trees behind his Robert Webb Road residence, was charged with one count of animal cruelty.

Laurens County sheriff’s Sgt. Robbie Toney said his office was tipped off in recent weeks by private investigators who said there might be a dogfighting operation on Loyd’s land.

“We think ... this guy was just a breeder of these pit bulls and people will buy them and turn around and use them in dogfighting,” Toney said Friday. “He’s a breeder, and that’s what he’s claiming, but he doesn’t have a breeder’s license. He has raised dogs and sold them for, I know, the past 25 years.”

Authorities, assisted by animal rescue groups, are now tending to 98 dogs taken from the property.

Toney said more than 80 of the animals were chained to trees with logging chains.

“It’s been raining the past couple of weeks, so some of the dogs were in standing water from where they had walked a circle around whatever they were staked to,” he said. “The only water that we could see that they were getting was ... the rainwater.”

Toney said that while the conditions were “pretty rough” for the dozens of dogs at Loyd’s property, the scene was “mild” compared to a previous pit bull case he investigated.

“There were some dogs I thought we were just gonna have to euthanize right there,” he said of the older case. “But the dogs we found (Thursday), only a couple of them appeared to be malnourished.”