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GREENSBORO — F-68 has a fresh leg wound, cutting deep into its white hair.

F-66, housed nearby, was so eaten up with fleas that it passed out before workers could administer medical care — and still appears wobbly.

G-105 stays up all night, his teeth pulling at the fence until it bends enough for him to get out — and he has.

F-69, covered in old bite wounds, shies away from a camera, inching to the back of his cage.

"To him, that camera looks like a big stick," said Marsha Williams, executive director of the Guilford County Animal Shelter.

The shelter is now responsible for the care of 15 pit bulls seized Friday from the property of a man who is charged with dogfighting and animal cruelty.

Making room for the dogs, which must be segregated and held as police evidence in a criminal case until a judge says otherwise, is already proving a hardship for the shelter — a Guilford County-owned center run by a nonprofit organization. The cost is high and taxpayers could eventually shoulder the burden of caring for the animals.

"They're taking up 15 cages — that's 15 adoptable animals we can't hold," Williams said. "We have doubled up on some animals."

Since the arrival of the pit bulls, the shelter has euthanized two dogs with medical conditions because they didn't have a cage for them, Williams said. Healthy adoptable animals could be next, she said.

The court case of 23-year-old Brian Keith Anderson II, of 1311 Elmer St., is just beginning, and the first month's tab for the care of the animals is estimated at $7,200. That's a $15 daily boarding fee and a $30 per animal impound fee for 15 dogs. That doesn't include the cost of veterinary care.

The county attorney's office plans to ask a judge to require Anderson to put up a bond to pay for the care of the animals, said Alyson Best, an environmental health manager with the county health department. The department oversees animal control and the shelter.

This is the first time the county has taken advantage of a new state law that allows the courts to require defendants in dogfighting cases to put up a bond for the cost of confiscated animals.

If Anderson doesn't put up the bond, animal control can ask that once a judge releases them from evidence, the dogs be surrendered to be euthanized. Pit bulls, Rottweilers and chows are never adopted from the shelter, Williams said.

Even if Anderson doesn't put up a bond, the criminal process could take months, said Guilford County Sheriff BJ Barnes, who also sits on the board of the United Animal Coalition, the nonprofit that runs the shelter.

Some of the pit bulls, discovered after an anonymous tip, were found chained to trees and metal posts, police said.

"The dog is the personal property of the defendant, and the defendant hasn't been convicted," Barnes said. "If the court decides that there's a legal issue, for example, that something was not done properly, and we hope that's not the case, and it was your animal, you're going to want your animal back. You're going to be very upset if it was gone."

The shelter had a case last year involving more than 30 pit bulls that were deemed vicious by animal control. The difference was the owner wasn't charged with a crime, and the dogs were euthanized within seven days.

"Every day we have them here, there's a risk to our employees and the other animals here," Williams said. "We have to clean them. We have to feed them. We have to take care of them. It's not like we can just walk by them every day and say, 'Oh well, you're mean and I'm not going to take care of you.' "

Shelter workers have found G-105 out of his cage several times already. He has never attempted to attack the workers, but the dogs have found ways to attack each other — they climb to the chain-link top of the concrete cells and scratch and bite each other.

"They're nice to people. They're just trained not to like each other," said Marissa Studivent, the shelter's veterinary technician manager. Studivent even lets G-105 nuzzle his nose against the back of her hand through the cage's bars.

Contact Nancy H. McLaughlin at 373-7049 or nmclaughlin@news-record.com