ANTIGO — Toward the end of a town unit meeting Thursday night, Jerry McGee, the chairman for the Town of Evergreen, described a problem in his municipality that most would rarely associate with local government.
Dogs.
Or, to be more precise, catching them.
While police still nab stray or loose dogs in Antigo, in his township — as well as in many others throughout the county — the responsibility falls to town chairmen like McGee, who at 73, understandably, no longer wants it.
“My legs are really starting to get weak and I have a hard enough time just walking around on level ground, much less trying to round a dog up and get it in a car and take it into Antigo,” McGee said. “I’ve got a nice vehicle, so I really don’t want to put that dog in my vehicle. I’ve got a crate that I try to get them in, but sometimes they don’t want to go in there and I’m always afraid of getting bitten. The dog never has a collar on it, so you don’t know if it’s vaccinated or not. Nobody’s claiming it, so if I get bit, then what are my options?”
McGee is not being bombarded with calls — he said there have been something like four since last summer. A few times, likewise, he has arrived to scenes to find that the callers already got hold of the dogs for him.
But other cases have been less simple.
“I did have another dog that was out on Highway 64 there and I couldn’t catch it,” he said. “People at a house nearby said they thought it was the neighbor’s dog down the road. I went there and yeah, it was their dog, but here it was blind, and it was going back out on the road and stuff there, so then they came up there and corralled it and got it. But when you’re out there on a busy road like that trying to catch one of those dogs, it’s not a good position to be in.”
Some townships in the county, however, do employ workers to capture loose animals.
“We pay ours $500 a year whether he catches 10 dogs, whether he catches no dogs,” said Town of Ackley Chairman Rick Bina. “I think in the last year that he caught two for us. So he might be willing to do more towns. I supposed if he was catching a dozen or so a year, he’d probably be like, ‘I don’t know if I want to take on any more,’ but there’s not that many that he’s doing.”
Langlade County Administrator Jason Hilger said if animal catchers such as the one currently working in Ackley are unwilling to volunteer for broadened duties and serve more townships, perhaps others can be found that would.
“My suggestion was that they put out a social media post and to have potentially two or three or more townships go in together to try to recruit a dog catcher,” Hilger said. “If they share the cost, then it might pay. If they all throw in $300, $400, $500, somebody could make themselves $1,500, $2,000, $3,000. Maybe then you could have a county-wide dog catcher or two, three, four dog catchers throughout the county that operate in the various quadrants — northeast, northwest, southeast, southwest, that kind of thing where they don’t have so far to drive and they could consolidate that. But it wasn’t going to be a county-paid thing. The towns would work together and contract together for that.”
Robert Zoretich, president of the Langlade County Humane Society’s board of directors, said he was well aware that a gap in animal control services existed in some townships, but at the moment, because of a lack of funding, his organization cannot fill it.
“The community complains to us and says, ‘Why don’t you do something about it?’ But we are not animal control and we don’t have the staff or resources to do it,” Zoretich said, though he went on to say that perhaps the Humane Society volunteers or staff might be interested in helping if they could be compensated. “Let’s say we get a call at night for a dog to be picked up in our county and our staff is free. We could do it on a case by case basis or through an agreement with the towns or the county.”
Zoretich said kennels at the Humane Society are often filled to capacity from animals brought in from around the area.
“We return an average of 10 dogs a month to their owners,” he said. “Good samaritans, police, town supervisors bring them in. We take care of on average 400 animals a year — about 150 dogs and about 300 cats. Probably seven to ten dogs come in a month that nobody claims or that are surrendered to us.”
McGee believes new pet owners sometimes quickly grow tired of taking care of their animals and simply release them, which Zoretich agreed was “absolutely true.”
“I think it’s kind of an ongoing problem,” McGee said. “It seems like it’s gotten a little worse here in the last while because some of these people have gotten these dogs and they can’t afford everything to go along with it. Out in the township, you’re supposed to pay a dog tax on them and then you’re supposed to have them vaccinated and health records kept up on them, and I think a lot of people, they’re just dumping them out in the country and letting somebody else deal with it.”
Hilger acknowledged dog catching was a service all towns needed to consider how to provide.
“Based on the conversation in the room during the town unit meeting, they all have this service to deal with,” Hilger said. “Some said it happens twice a year, others said four times a year. So I don’t think it’s a huge, huge issue, but certainly the town chair, when he gets a call, he’s got to deal with it somehow, whether he goes, his wife goes, they’ve got a constable that goes, or they’ve got a contract with a guy. So the stark truth is, it’s an issue for all of them.”
Those interested in performing dog catching duties should contact their town chairperson.
Most Popular
Comments / 0