“Hopefully, it’s not going to bite somebody else,” James said. “I worry about somebody else being out there. What if it was a little kid?”

Her fears aren’t exactly unfounded. So far this year, there have been more than a dozen dog bites reported within Flagstaff city limits, according to Flagstaff Police Department. In 2015, FPD’s lone animal control officer fielded 822 calls on top of more than 1,500 animal control-related reports that fell to other patrol officers. About 40 were for dog attacks.

Often the victims of those attacks have been smaller animals. On March 2, for instance, a woman and her 11-year-old daughter were walking their two dogs in the 6000 block of East Abineau Canyon Drive when three large dogs – a Saint Bermastiff, a pitbull mix and a Labrador retriever – escaped a yard, according to the FPD report. They attacked the victims’ pups and then turned on the humans.

A neighbor looked outside, where he saw the three large dogs bearing down on the woman and her daughter, who were both on the ground. He had to hit the attacking animals with an aluminum bat to get them to leave the girl and her mother alone. One of the victims’ dogs had large wounds on the neck and stomach but survived. The girl had a wound on her wrist that became infected. Her mother’s hand was injured.