6 Dead Dogs Discovered at Dump Site Underneath Oklahoma City Overpass

An animal rescue group discovered a dump site for dead dogs underneath a busy overpass in Oklahoma City.

The site was under the I-40 overpass near Tinker Diagonal Street, close to the Del City border. Angie Tomlinson, one of the co-directors of Miller's Cause Animal Rescue, said on Wednesday, April 5, a colleague's friend found a pit bull running down the middle of I-40. The dog was eventually caught. When the rescuers were trying to find the pit bull's owner, two men told them about the dead dogs dumped underneath the overpass.

The next day, Tomlinson and Debbie Davis-Sanders with The Marlee Project went to the site underneath the overpass, where they found six dead dogs. The first two carcasses they saw were laying side-by-side.

"It was very clear to us that these dogs did not die naturally," said Tomlinson. "There's no way two dogs laid themselves back-to-back on their sides and died naturally."

Tomlinson said they soon noticed another dead dog that appeared to have been tossed from the overpass.

"There is one dog that - the way it's laying because it's on its back, splayed out backwards across a log and it's right (below) the bridge - that it looks like someone threw it off the bridge," said Tomlinson.

Tomlinson believed one of the six dead dogs may have been shot.

"There's one dog that somehow has crawled itself up under a lot of shrubbery under a big tree. And it's not easy to get to it. But when you look at that dog, it doesn't have a lower jaw or a face. It has the top of its skull but all the bottom is missing," said Tomlinson. "It looks like it's been shot."

OKC Animal Welfare Superintendent Jon Gary said one of the shelter's cruelty investigators checked on the dead dogs, which were at different stages of decomposition. While the carcasses had no noticeable injuries, it was unclear if the dogs were abused when they were alive. The dead dogs did not have anything that linked them to an owner, Gary said.

There were no cameras at the site, Gary added.

Although it was unclear how the dogs died, Tomlinson said Oklahoma was in "a real animal welfare crisis.” She referenced a recent case in which someone drowned four dogs at Edwards Park in Oklahoma City.

"It's hard to know is this a deranged person and is this part of the same people that dumped animals at the pond? Or are these people who are finding stray dogs on the street because we are overrun with animals and we don't have a good place to take them? And yes, Oklahoma City Animal Welfare is in a crisis right now. But this has been going on long before the recent illness at the shelter," said Tomlinson.

Tomlinson said in order to protect animals, people need to work together to push for change.

"I think as a community, we have to seriously understand that we cannot rescue our way out of this problem," said Tomlinson. "For the last 10 years, we've been working really hard to rescue dogs, pull dogs out of shelters, adopt them out, move them out of state. But we're now at a point where all the other states are full of dogs. We've moved all the dogs we can move and we're still producing more dogs than there are homes for. So we have to really work as a state and a community to increase funding, to increase resources and access to spay/neuter laws, and make laws that are enforceable and then enforce them."