"I shall send a letter to each of them as well as pictures.... This is such a shocking sight that it makes your blood boil. It is a bloody disgrace, and turns tourists away."

Buschmann claimed she saw a female dog in Tsiigehtchic with six pups, all without food and water and all in obvious distress.

The mother "looked one step away from starving to death herself, and seemed to have no milk for the puppies," she wrote.

It is certainly not the first complaint of animal abuse in the region, but it is certainly the first time in recent memory a tourist has threatened to use economic pressure to see its end.

RCMP Const. Craig Thur may sympathize. Last Friday night, he came home from a farewell party to find a several-month-old husky puppy in a box, tended by other RCMP members. A resident had called to complain to police, after seeing a girl about nine years old bashing the puppy against a utilidor.

The puppy's leg was broken in the incident, and he now has the animal at his home. "I've got its leg in a splint," said Thur. "Hopefully it will heal."

Last fall, Angela McInnes hoped to start an Inuvik chapter of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. This was after finding a cat suffering from cramps and seizures, which she later learned were caused by a local teenager who forced the cat to drink vodka and then slammed it into a wall.

"I don't have the slightest idea why people do this," she said then.

Bylaw officer Daryle Foster spent a great deal of his time just chasing loose dogs, until in February council agreed to the hiring of animal control officers -- local people under contract to capture or destroy dogs.

This was part of an "all-out blitz" council promised, to solve the stray dog issue. Council also posted an advertisement notifying the public of the town's intention to shoot stray dogs if they could not be seized safely.

Foster said he and his officers still catch about one dog a day, and about 75 per cent of them are not claimed before they are destroyed. The problem does not seem to be getting any better.

"I don't know if it's getting worse," said Foster. "You have bad periods no matter what time of year."

Mayor George Roach was in Yellowknife this week, and was unavailable for comment.

The town's animal control bylaw loosely defines animal cruelty, giving officers the discretion to charge owners if they deem appropriate. This would include animals on short chains, or without food, and other forms of abuse. The penalties range from fines of a few hundred dollars up to six months in jail.

Inuvik isn't the only community with the problem. A Tuktoyaktuk man who spoke on the condition of anonymity told the xxxDrum this week of "widespread and rampant" examples of abuse he's seen there.

One involved a dog with a choked bark, which he later discovered was caused by a extremely tight collar, a collar that had not be loosened as the dog grew from pup to adult.

"The best way to deal with this problem is to have tourists and people from outside speak out," said the man. "Living in town, I just can't do that, but a tourist has nothing to lose."

Buschmann would agree. "Your town as well as others are dependant on tourism to make a living and create jobs," she wrote. "Don't you think that this is a part of your responsibility to stop this cruelty to animals? How can you be like an ostrich, sticking your head in the sand and hoping the problem goes away?"