Pregnant Woman Killed by Dogs During Hunt

Authorities in France are testing 93 dogs to determine which of them attacked and killed a pregnant woman. Prosecutor Frederic Trinh says the 29-year-old woman died from "bleeding after several dog bites to the upper and lower limbs and the head" after she was attacked Saturday in forest land outside the town of Villers-Cotterêts, around 55 miles northeast of Paris, the BBC reports. Dogs were being used for a deer hunt in the area, and the prosecutor says the woman, who was six months pregnant and had been walking her own five dogs, called her husband because she was worried that some "threatening dogs" might attack her.

Authorities say the husband found his wife's body after hearing the distressed cries of her dogs. Trinh says dogs from the hunt as well as the woman's dogs are being tested, AFP reports. He says some of the bites apparently happened postmortem. The French hunting association claims "nothing shows the involvement of hunting hounds in the death of this woman," though animal welfare groups disagree. Brigitte Bardot, president of an animal welfare foundation, urged authorities to end "immediately all hunt authorization for this season." (More France stories.)