Dog Fighting Ring Busted at Home Day Care

By Prescott Carlson in News on Sep 23, 2009 9:25PM

We don't know about you, but our main priorities when choosing a day care center for our kids are that it's clean, the caregivers are good with children, and most importantly, that it doesn't also contain a pit bull fighting ring. So a home day care in Maywood definitely wouldn't have made our short list after the Cook County Sheriff raided it, breaking up an alleged dog fighting operation and rescuing 9 dogs, all of which needed medical attention. Some of the dogs were in horrific condition -- Sheriff Tom Dart told the press that they "found a dog with its eye ripped out, a dog with a leg twisted backward and a dog with its lower extremities nearly ripped off its body," and another dog that appeared to have very recently been in a fight and "its chest... was shredded and its penis was bitten almost completely off."

When officers showed up at the home, 10 children were being watched as part of the day care operation being run there. In the garage, police reportedly found an aggressive dog and blood on the floors. The dog had fresh wounds, presumably from fighting. Police searched two more homes on the block allegedly involved in the dog fighting operation, where they found more injured dogs and dog-fighting training equipment.

Three men were arrested -- two charged with felony dog fighting, while the other, an ex-con who police say charged $60 a month to allow dogs to be kept at his home, was charged with the new misdemeanor crime that prohibits felons from owning un-spayed or un-neutered dogs.