By JAN LARSON McLAUGHLIN
BG Independent News
More than 550 door-to-door checks for unlicensed dogs in Wood County have netted several owners who have neglected to get dog tags.
The license can be a lost dog’s ticket back home – plus it’s the law in Ohio that every dog has one. So from March to November, county dog shelter employees will be going door-to-door checking to see if owners have complied.
At times, it just doesn’t work for citizens to conceal their canines when county dog shelter workers come knocking.
“Sometimes they answer the door and the dog comes up with them,” Wood County Dog Warden Andrew Snyder said, smiling.
The dog owners are given a chance to buy the licenses then and there. “We want them to voluntarily comply, not to issue citations,” Snyder said.
Normally, citations are only issued if the dog warden’s staff finds repeat offenders, who have an annual habit of only buying dog licenses once they are caught without one.
“There are people who try to get away with it every year,” Snyder told the Wood County Commissioners during a meeting on Thursday.
Staff members are visiting homes that previously had licensed dogs, and some addresses picked at random.
“That’s the only way to find people that have never registered their dogs,” Snyder said.
In March, the checks were done in Haskins and Northwood. In April they were conducted in Northwood, Jerry City, Bloomdale, Pemberville, Perrysburg, North Baltimore, Weston, Portage and Cygnet. And in May, the checks were done in Bowling Green, Custar, Walbridge, Perrysburg, Rudolph, Weston, Risingsun, Bradner and Wayne.
Door-to-door license checks will continue until November, with another 1,800 residences in the county on the list to be checked.
Snyder also reported on the overall sales of dog licenses in the county. So far this year, there have been 20,243 issued, which is 595 fewer than last year, and 817 fewer than the highest year on record. Snyder explained that the county had been seeing a decline in dog licenses recently.
“We weren’t implementing enough of these checks,” he said. “They keep people on their toes.”
The county has also seen an increase in the number of dog owners buying multi-year licenses, so they don’t have to renew them so often.
Snyder also updated the commissioners on statistics for dogs picked up by staff or dropped off at the shelter. The shelter has an 85.9 percent “live release rate,” not factoring in the dogs deemed “non-adoptable” because they are aggressive or injured.
So far this year, the shelter has taken in nearly 200 dogs. Of those, 80 dogs have been redeemed by their owners; 85 have been adopted with 24 of those by rescue operations; and 27 were euthanized.
