A pack of wild dogs roaming along U.S. 61 South is creating problems for residents, businesses and people traveling the highway, and raising concerns about potential health risks.

“This has been going on for three years,” Vicksburg-Warren County Humane Society Director Georgia Lynn said. “We’ve been getting hundreds and hundreds of calls since they’ve been roaming the area. We have found several litters of dead puppies and puppies that have been run over in the road.

“These are wild, feral dogs,” she said. “They are not vaccinated and they go in the woods, where they come in contact with animals that carry rabies like raccoons, skunks, foxes and coyotes.”

Currently, she said, the dogs are very shy and run when people approach, “but we don’t know what may happen if they take the ‘fight or flight’ response to the other extreme, or if a dog becomes rabid and comes in contact with humans.”

Lynn said the pack consists of eight to 12 dogs and is usually found on a strip of land adjacent to the U.S. 61/Natchez exit of Interstate 20 East across from Walmart, but they roam all over the area. Sometimes individual or two or three dogs have been seen on Iowa Avenue and Pemberton Square Boulevard or farther south.

The animals were seen Monday morning eating on a deer carcass near U.S. 61 South and Rifle Range Road.

She said attempts to trap them have had limited success, while Vicksburg animal control director Eldridge Skinner said attempts by the city to catch them have been unsuccessful.

“We’ve caught six in three years — two adults and four puppies,” Lynn said. “The puppies were about 4 months old and already wild. They couldn’t be tamed for pets and had to be euthanized with the adults. We worked with the puppies for four weeks, but we were able to tame only one and it was adopted.”

She said the animals are very resourceful — especially a yellow female that appears to be the leader of the pack — and have managed to avoid the traps.

“She is extremely street smart,” she said. “We need to catch her, because she keeps having litter after litter. She looks pathetic. And we have other females now, because some of her female pups have matured.”

Lynn said Walmart had been reluctant in the past to allow traps on its property, but store manager Roger Washington said Monday he was willing to do whatever it takes to get the animals away from the store. He said he usually sees the dogs on the lot across from the store in the early morning.

When the dogs first appeared at Walmart, he said, customers would feed them, but that has stopped.

Sheila Blalack, who lives farther south in Yokena, said she fed the dogs at Walmart until she was told to stop. She said she leaves water and food by the I-20 exit for the dogs on her way to work in the morning.

Skinner said he has asked her to stop feeding the animals so they can be trapped.

“When those dogs see food, they bypass the traps,” he said.

Blalack said if she stops feeding them, the dogs will go back to raiding Walmart’s dumpsters for food.

“Something needs to be done about them,” she said. “They look so bad, especially that female. They need help.”