"Drive down any of the long, rutted back roads of Anza, a dusty Riverside County community, and it won’t take long before you feel like you’ve fallen off the grid.

Telephone poles disappear. Street signs and lights are nowhere to be seen. And ramshackle houses and fences hide behind thickets of weather-beaten manzanita and chaparral.

If you’re quiet, you’ll hear the wind roll across the valley, or maybe the bell-like clink of a sage sparrow in a nearby bush. But if you make a sound, one, two, three or more barking, growling dogs clamber down toward you — dogs that Riverside County animal control officer Harvey Beck says are no joke.

This spring, a pack of free-roaming hounds — identified as three Labrador mixes, two Queensland blue heelers and a husky — slaughtered a herd of goats and two sheep. The bloodbath was documented on Facebook with gut-churning photographs and descriptions."

Susanne Rust reports for the Los Angeles Times January 4, 2024. [2]