A Texas Man Was Eaten By Dogs, Authorities Don’t Know If He Was Alive Or Dead When It Happened

A Texas man was eaten by his dogs, and so thoroughly was his body consumed by the animals that authorities can’t say for sure if he died before or after the dogs ate him.

As The Bluefield Daily Telegraph reports, Freddie Mack hadn’t been seen or heard from for a long time, and his friends and family feared him missing. However, they were unable to check on him because he was known to have at least 18 large dogs, some of them from aggressive breeds, and they lived on his property.

Over the course of several weeks in April and May, authorities tried a variety of ways to get a look at his property, at times trying drones or police K-9s. When none of that worked, they had no choice but to go to his property and try to deal with Mack’s dogs.

When authorities arrived at Mack’s trailer home, they used a variety of diversionary tactics to occupy the dogs while officers could look around. What they found was gruesome.

WARNING: The next paragraph contains content that may be disturbing to some readers.

There was little left of Mr. Mack except for a few scraps of clothes and some random remains. Using DNA testing on what was left of Freddie, as well as the animals, authorities determined that the dogs had eaten him. Specifically, one of two things happened: either the dogs turned on Mack while he was still living, and ate him alive; or Mr. Mack, who was known to have serious medical problems, died, and the dogs, after days of not being fed, ate his corpse.

Officials determined that a Venus, Texas, man, originally thought to be missing, was consumed by his dogs.https://t.co/rI6jM9e1km

— melissa whitfield (@myssi) July 10, 2019

Authorities seized 16 of the dogs, the other two of whom had been killed by their peers. Thirteen of them were put down; it’s not clear, as of this writing, what became of the other three.

Dogs are, culturally anyway, considered the most loyal of man’s animal companions. But when driven to extremes by hunger, says National Geographic, even domesticated dogs will eat their owners’ bodies if they feel they have no other choice.

And in some cases, they don’t even wait until they’re hungry. In a 1997 case, a man committed suicide, and within minutes, police who arrived on the scene said, the man’s German Shepherd had eaten part of him, likely attracted by the fresh blood on the victim’s body, even though the animal had a half-full bowl of dog food just a few feet away.