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Lawmakers take aim at Alaska’s chronic problems with abandoned and loose dogs
- Alaska Beacon
- 4 hours ago
- 9 min read
More access to veterinarian care, which is scarce in rural communities, would boost both human health and safety as well as animal welfare, bill supporters say
By Yereth Rosen
Alaska Beacon
Rural Alaska has long struggled with an abundance of stray and loose dogs and high rates of dog bites, with young children as the most frequent victims.
Pending state and federal legislation aims to chip away at that problem by improving access to veterinary care, currently difficult to obtain in wide swathes of Alaska.
At the state level, House Bill 258, sponsored by Rep. Will Stapp, R-Fairbanks, would establish a state fund to help cover spay and neuter services. Money for the fund, intended to fill gaps in currently available care, would come from sales of specialized license plates, which other states offer, and donations. The fund would also generate its own investment income.
The intent is to relieve the stresses on animal welfare, people and communities, including local shelters that are “overwhelmed by the costs of animal control and care,” Stapp wrote in a statement explaining his sponsorship of the bill.
“This legislation takes a preventative, fiscally responsible approach to an issue that affects communities throughout Alaska,” the statement concludes.
The bill has attracted three cosponsors and support from the animal-care community, Alaska Veterinary Medical Association and the Alaska Municipal League, among other groups.
At the federal level, Sen. Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska, is pushing for legislation to get veterinary care included in the duties of the Indian Health Service. At present, the agency does not have the authority to pay for veterinarian care.
Murkowski’s bill has three Democratic cosponsors, from New Mexico, Hawaii and Minnesota, all states with significant Indigenous populations that are served by the IHS. It passed the Senate in December and is now pending in the House. A nearly identical measure sponsored by Murkowski and the same Democratic colleagues passed the Senate in late 2024, but it died before time ran out on that Congress.
The bill has support from Native organizations — including the Alaska Federation of Natives, the Alaska Native Tribal Health Consortium, the Yukon-Kuskokwim Health Corporation and the Navajo Nation, which is coping with problems in its tribal areas that are similar to those in Alaska.
It is an approach backed by experts as part of the “One Health” framework that considers human, animal and environmental health as linked.
“Veterinarians play an integral role in One Health because animals both impact and are impacted by people and the environment,” the American Veterinary Medical Association says on its website.
Human health impacts
Dogs are part of life in Alaska, where travel by dogsled is an aspect of Indigenous cultures. But problems caused by abandoned, stray and loose dogs are myriad.
Alaska consistently has the nation’s highest rate of dog bites, according to state officials. The rate of dog-bite cases treated in hospitals has been especially high in rural areas; a 2014 epidemiology report said that rate in Southwest and Northern Alaska was two to three times the national rate. Children are at particular risk. And 2009 research, albeit dated, found that Alaska had the highest per-capita rate of fatal dog maulings among all states, with a rate more than 16 times the national average.
The Navajo Nation has also struggled with strays. After a 13-year-old girl was killed in a dog mauling in 2021, the tribal government made a push to boost animal control services. The tribe’s senior animal control officer estimated at the time that there were 500,000 domestic and feral dogs on the Navajo Nation and that a single pair of mating dogs could create up to 5,700 new dogs in five years.
Several diseases are associated with loose dogs, notably parvovirus. Endemic in Alaska dogs, parvovirus can kill pets and, if spread to people, cause serious health problems for those who are pregnant or immunocompromised.
Rabies, endemic in wild canines in Alaska, is a perennial threat, notably to sled dogs that might be attacked outdoors. Human cases have been rare in Alaska, but they are serious; rabies is always fatal to people once the virus reaches the brain. To prevent that spread, exposed people get rabies shots as quickly as possible.
The risk of tick-borne diseases is increasing in Alaska as climate change enables northward tick expansion, according to state health officials. Alaskans may be under the mistaken impression that ticks are not a problem in the state and may thus underestimate their dogs’ vulnerabilities, the Alaska Department of Fish and Game has warned.
Feral cats can spread diseases, too. A feral cat was implicated in the first recorded fatality from borealpox, a newly discovered and highly rare disease that was initially called Alaskapox; the victim was a Kenai Peninsula man who had cared for a stray cat before dying in early 2024.
Emotional costs
There are associated mental health problems as well.
In rural villages where there are limited management options, stray dogs are sometimes killed, which is “cruel and inhumane,” Christine Witzmann, a board member with Alaska Rural Veterinary Outreach Inc., told the House Resources Committee at a Feb. 16 hearing.
“It is also traumatic for the children, who suffer deep emotional scars when they witness how their favorite stray dog is killed,” said Witzmann, whose organization is one of many nonprofits around the state that provide subsidies for spay and neuter services.
There can be similar trauma in urban areas, where workers in overcrowded shelters are sometimes tasked with euthanizing animals, another expert said in hearing testimony.
“That’s a terrible job that we don’t ever think about. The people who actually have to do the euthanizing, that’s mentally traumatizing to them,” Angie Fitch of the nonprofit Alaska Rural Veterinary Inc. told the committee.
Her organization has provided animal care in more than 100 rural communities over the past 14 years, she said. But despite efforts like that, she and representatives of other nonprofits said, resources to support the volunteer work are scarce and needs remain unmet.
Veterinarian shortages exist around the country, but they are acute in rural Alaska. Shortages are particularly dire in Western Alaska’s Yukon-Kuskokwim region.
Residents there generally cherish their dogs — 94% of survey respondents in the Yukon-Kuskokwim respondents reported having dogs, and the human-dog relationship has been part of Indigenous culture for centuries — but large majorities identified stray dogs as a problem, a source of community fear, according to a Colorado State University study published in July.
Dog owners in the region reported that only 62% of their animals had been vaccinated against rabies and only 53% had undergone full sterilization procedures, according to the study.
Service to rural Alaska often relies on traveling veterinarians.
Dr. Eli Butler is one of them. Originally from Kenai and a graduate of the collaborative University of Alaska Fairbanks-Colorado State University veterinary medicine program that has been operating for the past decade, Butler was in Nome for a week in early April.
Although she had traveled to other parts of Alaska, it was her first time in Nome, which is famous for its sled dogs and is the site of the finish line for the Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race.
Butler did some spay and neuter procedures during her stint working at the Nome Animal House, a local pet care center. But she was busier with dental care, she said. Poor tooth health can be a problem for dogs, especially older animals, she said.
“It is great to be able to come out here and help an area that really, really needs it,” she said.
Feral dilemma
Stapp’s bill stops short of authorizing any kind of birth control for animals that are already feral. A provision would have allowed municipalities to have trap-neuter-release programs for stray animals, as are carried out in other states. But that was stripped from the bill because it would conflict with state wildlife regulations. It is illegal to release animals into the wild except in certain specially permitted situations, said Ryan Scott, director of the Department of Fish and Game’s Division of Wildlife Conservation.
Feral animals do a lot of damage to wildlife populations, killing birds, small game mammals and other native creatures, he said. A trap-neuter-release program would do little to address that problem as long as people continue to abandon unwanted dogs and cats, he said.
“That particular animal is not going to reproduce. However, you’ve got to get them all,” he said.
Ideally, he said, stray dogs and cats would be adopted out if they are captured, spayed, neutered — and vaccinated, something that pets need periodically.
There are organizations that try to accomplish that but it takes a lot of work. In 2020, for example, the nonprofit Bethel Friends of Canines worked with other organizations to capture all the stray dogs in the Yukon-Kukokwim village of Tuntutuiak and prepare them for adoption.
Rabies threats
Murkowski’s bill does contain a section that concerns nondomestic animals – specifically, addressing the circulation of rabies in Arctic wildlife.
Her bill has a provision that would require the U.S. Department of Agriculture to complete a feasibility study on possible delivery of oral rabies vaccines to wildlife species known to be reservoirs of the rabies virus in the Arctic region, notably Arctic foxes, which spend much of their lives on sea ice.
Climate change is expected to have mixed impacts on rabies in Alaska. Because Arctic foxes have been the main reservoir, and because the icy habitat for that species is diminishing, it is likely that the prevalence will decrease, according to a 2018 study by UAF scientists. But red foxes, which are bigger, bolder and more likely to lurk around communities, are expanding into territory previously used by Arctic foxes and may become the primary rabies carriers, scientists have said.
Red foxes are implicated in most of the known rabies cases in what has been a significant late-winter outbreak in rural Alaska communities. From early February to early March, there were 10 confirmed cases and two more suspected cases, said Dr. Kimberlee Beckmen, veterinarian for the Alaska Department of Fish and Game.
That compares to last year’s total 11 rabies cases in wild animals, Beckmen said during an online webinar held March 10 by the Alaska Native Tribal Health Consortium’s Local Environmental Observer Network. “Now we’ve surpassed that in just one month,” she said.
Rabies infections can spread beyond canines.
A river otter in Kuskokwim River village of Nightmute tested positive for rabies last year, Beckman reported in her presentation.
In 2021, a river otter in Nome also tested positive for rabies, the first such case in Alaska since 2000, when a river otter in the Aleutians East Borough was found to be infected, according to the Alaska Department of Fish and Game.
In 2023, an aggressive moose that entered the Inupiat village of Teller north of Nome was also found to be infected with rabies. It was Alaska’s first documented case of a rabid moose, and it was presumed to have been bitten by an infected fox.
Prospects for passage
Murkowski said the chances of her bill winning final passing are unclear. Success will probably depend on getting it combined with broader health legislation, she said.
“Passing a standalone bill anymore is just hard unless it is absolutely, 100% noncontroversial,” she said. “People are going to look at it and say, ‘Well, I don’t understand it, so there must be something in here that I should object to.’”
The bill has been sitting in the U.S. House since Dec. 15 without any action. The bill, if passed, would impose some new costs. The Congressional Budget Office estimated that adding veterinary care to the Indian Health Service’s mission, as proposed in the bill, would cost $3 million to $4 million a year.
Stapp’s spay-and-neuter fund bill would also create some new costs.
The program would be administered by the Alaska Department of Environmental Conservation at a cost of $536,200 in the first year and $331,300 every year after that, according to the Department of Revenue’s analysis. There is no way to know how much of that cost would be offset by the fundraising mechanism established by the bill, the analysis said.
As with Murkowski’s bill, the prospects for Stapp’s bill are unclear as the legislature’s scheduled May 20 adjournment deadline looms.
Still, it is a popular measure that has touched a nerve in the public, lawmakers acknowledge.
“Thank you for bringing forward a bill that fills up my mailbox, my email box,” Rep. Jeremy Bynum, R-Ketchikan, quipped to Stapp at a May 7 House Finance Committee hearing.
“There’ll be plenty more emails, and they’ll keep coming until the vote improves there, Rep. Bynum,” Stapp responded.
• Yereth Rosen came to Alaska in 1987 to work for the Anchorage Times. She has been reporting on Alaska news ever since, covering stories ranging from oil spills to sled-dog races. She has reported for Reuters, for the Alaska Dispatch News, for Arctic Today and for other organizations. Alaska Beacon is part of States Newsroom, the nation’s largest state-focused nonprofit news organization.This article was produced as a project for USC Annenberg’s Center for Health Journalism and Center for Climate Journalism and Communication 2025 Health and Climate Change Reporting Fellowship.
