Detroit is slowly becoming overrun with packs of wild dogs, Bloomberg reports.
As many as 50,000 stray dogs are now roaming the streets and shacking up in one of the city's thousands of abandoned buildings, Bloomberg reports. Many of them have been abandoned by their owners, who can no longer afford to care for them.
It's becoming a problem for mail carriers and people who like to go on walks — the U.S. Postal Service temporarily stopped delivering mail to some neighborhoods because of the aggressive animals. One mail carrier told Bloomberg that she uses pepper spray to fend off the swarms of dogs.
The problem hasn't sprung up overnight — Rolling Stone's Mark Binelli reported a very similar story last year, pointing out that a lack of animal control officers in the city makes the problem tough to control. Another issue is the city itself. The Detroit Free Press recently created a map of the city's abandoned buildings, and the results are striking. Most of the city is colored brown, which signifies areas with "a significant presence of abandoned buildings."
The dog issue is just another sign of the once-thriving city's decline. Detroit's population has plunged in recent decades and it has the highest violent crime rate of any large city in the U.S.