By Nick Cenegy
Star Staff Writer
11-07-2007
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| Anniston Police Patrol Officer Justin Sanford assists Animal Control Officer Keith Putman on Monday in capturing one of six stray dogs corralled in a Hillyer High Road backyard. Photo: Nick Cenegy/The Anniston Star |
It sounds like something from a bad horror flick. The owner of a home in a secluded, densely wooded neighborhood walks out to his car Monday morning to go to work.
A pack of six half-starved, mangy dogs appears from nowhere and starts after him.
It wasn’t a movie for Bill Downey, who lives on the 700 block of Hillyer High Road. It was real.
Downey, vice president for marketing at Consolidated Publishing Co., which publishes The Anniston Star, had just closed the door to his house when the six dogs approached him, looking aggressive.
The dogs appeared to be strays, mixed breeds of various types and colors. Their ribs showed under mange-damaged fur.
The dogs followed Downey into his backyard. He slipped back out, fastened the gate, and called Anniston Police. They dispatched Animal Control Officer Keith Putman.
When Putman arrived at around 8:30 a.m., he started corralling some of the dogs. After a tiring hour, he realized he couldn’t capture all of them himself. The dogs used the yard’s layout to their advantage, spreading out to avoid capture.
Putman called for backup.
He and the responding patrol officer, Justin Sanford, tried baiting, caging and corralling the animals. The dogs weren’t going to go that easily.
For 3 1/2 hours the two men cornered dogs one at a time and slipped a noose — a “control pole” some call it — around their necks before dragging them up to the driveway and into the truck.
With the first few in the truck, Putman and Sanford brought out a tranquilizer rifle to help slow the others down.
They flushed and cornered one dog at a time, trying to get clear shots.
But it wasn’t like the movies. Once the dogs were hit, they didn’t just lie down and go to sleep.
Dogs are more difficult to wrangle than humans, Sanford observed. “I’d probably be more prone to tackle a human,” he said, laughing.
With three dogs captured, it appeared for a while that just one remained.
The officers spotted fresh holes along the fence line and thought the other dogs had escaped.
But as they carefully stepped their way through the foliage on the downward slope of the yard, they flushed a female dog, who led them back up the hill to a wooden deck.
There, the three remaining dogs went to earth.
They tucked themselves deep behind an earthen berm in the shadows of an eight-inch crevice.
For the next hour, Putman and Sanford’s flashlights illuminated the eyes of three once-aggressive dogs, now huddled beyond the pole’s reach.
Putman is the only full-time animal control officer at the Anniston Police Department. That means a lot of on-the-job instruction for other officers is needed.
Sanford crouched under the low deck, preparing the few remaining tranquilizer darts, learning as he worked how to load them with the drug.
“The guys on the shift are always really good about helping out,” Putman said.
Although Sanford has helped Putman on a number of occasions, this was the first time he had loaded the darts.
The two exchanged banter, despite crouching on sharp concrete chunks and ducking cobwebs while staring down the business end of three feral dogs.
“I think I’ll buy you lunch for helping me out,” Putman said.
He shed his body armor and his gun belt and was scooting up closer to the dogs to try to slip a noose over the head of one. His arms were stretched out in front of him. He had no leverage to move — no chance to defend himself if a dog came at him.
“I see what you’re doing here,” Sanford joked. “You’re trying to starve them out, aren’t you?”
Putman said he responds to 20 or so calls a day and takes 10 to 12 dogs to the shelter.
The dogs were exhausted, and so were the men.
The remaining three were “playing possum” behind the mound. They didn’t snap at the control pole but continued to avoid its grasp.
Here's how they caught the dogs...
