Animal Control still looking for small dog pack seen ranging downtown
A wide-ranging but small pack of dogs, likely originating in the South Rome or Maple Avenue area, is still a focus of Animal Control officers after multiple reports.
While Public Animal Welfare Services Director Jeff Mitchell said there haven’t been many issues in the past couple of weeks, they’ve set out traps and officers are still looking.
One issue is that the dogs appear to have a food source or even, possibly, have a place to live — and dogs that aren’t hungry are harder to catch.
“Unfortunately if the animals aren’t hungry they won’t go into the trap and there are other food sources available,” Mitchell said. “Normally, pack dogs, they’re scavengers.”
Reports have come from Maple Road all the way to Myrtle Hill and even over toward the downtown area. Most of the incidents have occurred about the same time at night.
It’s a possibility someone is putting their dogs out at night and, left to their own devices, the pups are becoming a nuisance.
“I’m wondering if it’s somebody’s dogs from the South Rome or Maple area,” Mitchell said to the county public safety committee, which met early Wednesday.
He told the committee that they caught nine dogs and a coyote last year that were part of another pack that had been sighted around St. Mary’s Catholic School in East Rome numerous times.
But this is a different pack. Trail camera photos have shown four dogs consistently that seem to be going to or from areas around Maple Avenue or South Rome.
If they continue to get complaints but have no luck finding the dogs, Mitchell said he’ll likely wait until the tree canopy diminishes during fall, ask Floyd County EMA for help sighting the pack with drones and then capture them.