NEO MADITLA
Staff Reporter
Residents baying for blood after a three-year-old boy was mauled to death by a pack of dogs in Sweet Home Farm in Philippi, gathered in groups and, armed with planks, bricks and rocks, hunted down stray dogs in the area, killing at least one.
They also snatched a pair of puppies and placed them on the nearby railway tracks. These, however, managed to escape unharmed.
Philasanda Mbokothola was the second child to be attacked by dogs in Sweet Home Farm in the past four months.
Alutho Hinana, also three, lost her eyesight in February after she was attacked by dogs.
Her mother, Nonyaniso Hinana, 38, said her daughter was still recovering in Red Cross Children’s Hospital.
Yesterday, a trail of blood from the Mbokothola home to a small body covered by a grey blanket.
Next to him lay a pair of red shorts and a brown polo neck shirt that were allegedly ripped off his body as he was dragged out of his home by what residents said was a pack of four dogs.
Philasanda had been playing in the house with his sister, Philanathi, 4, when their mother, Yonela Mbokothola, 19, left the front door open and went to the public toilet they share with other residents.
At the toilets, her phone rang.
“It was my neighbour asking me where I was… because my child was being mauled by dogs,” said Mbokothola.
She said she had run back home to discover a crowd trying to pull the dogs off her son’s body.
She said she had been greeted by the gruesome sight of her son, who had been savaged.
He was already dead.
“I just took my baby and sat down with him and started crying,” said Mbokothola.
Khanyiswa Lentoni, 35, a neighbour who was sitting with Mbokothola when the Cape Argus arrived, explained that she made the phone call to Mbokothola when she allegedly saw the dogs dragging the child outside.
Lentoni said she had snatched up Philanathi during the attack and taken her to her house.
“We do not understand why the dogs came into the house or why they (the dogs) chose to attack one child and not the other,” Lentoni said.
Outside the home, residents had gathered around a police van with placards that said: “No More Dogs in Sweet Home.”
Lentoni said they did not want the dogs in the area, “because when you hit them they do not run away”.
Some of the residents said the dogs were strays and that about 10 of them lived in a deserted shack about five minutes from the Mbokothola home.
When the SPCA arrived, the dogs were nowhere to be seen.
SPCA inspectors Moyo Ndogwana and Fagan Vollenhoven said this was the 10th incident this month they had responded to in the area, where dogs had attacked people.
The inspectors managed to round up a few strays and took them away.
Ndogwana said some residents had taken a few puppies and placed them on the railway lines to kill them.
It is not clear who had rescued the puppies or whether they had managed to get away from the tracks on their own.
SPCA chief executive Allan Perrins appealed to residents not to adopt “an eye for an eye solution as this would be unlawful in terms of the Animal Protection Act”.
“Rather carefully consider the reasons for the recent spate of unprovoked attacks on people.”
He said the SPCA’s mobile clinics would be visiting the area for the rest of this week and into next week to take in animals and try to prevent animal cruelty and suffering.