Or is it your acces to the Internet?
Never mind whether it’s just being reported more often.
This dude was a squatter and being in a vacant house, that could have been just a stray dog with no human. Little sympathy here.
A lot of cities/counties keep track of “recovered” dogs and cats. ie—dead dogs and cats that animal control picks up. 20 years ago San Jose had a binder 5” thick, 95% of the ‘recovered’ animals were dogs shot by police.
So...nothing new. Stories are just easy to forward by email/facebook/etc, especially since compared to today, almost no one had email back then