The wild among us need a helping hand
You see them standing on the side of roads, ears up, watching traffic, waiting for the moment to cross. Sometimes alone; sometimes in pairs or threes. If you look closely, they have no collars or tags, but they have a sense of purpose. They are typically healthy, shy — they move away when approached — and they don’t bark.
At our intersection near Eldorado, there are three. They hang by the highway — which makes me nervous — yet they seem expert at judging traffic. They have no collars but seem perfectly healthy and fed.
On the social media platform, Nextdoor.com, every day there are reports of dogs running wild just in Eldorado, sometimes with tags but often not. They are not feral, they “belong” to someone, but that “someone” has a very different approach to partnering with a dog.
True feral dogs are at least a generation removed from human contact and are truly wild. While not a problem in the city of Santa Fe, Mary Martin, the former executive director of the Santa Fe Animal Shelter & Humane Society (www.sf humanesociety.org) recalls a colony of feral dogs that has lived for generations in the park that surrounds the Cloisters in the middle of Manhattan. They stick to themselves, stay in the park and have adapted to urban life.
In Santa Fe, most dogs that you see without collars wandering around are not truly feral. A better way to think about them is that they are “loosely connected” to a family, a ranch or a farm. They are often born on the property, but pretty much left to fend for themselves, and they are often quite successful: They eat, socialize with other dogs and of course (and unfortunately) breed.
Full disclosure: Growing up in Minnesota farm country, that’s exactly what our dogs were — loosely connected and semisocialized. But then, so were most of the kids. Summer came, we were gone with instructions only to be back by dinner. In the late summer, when school began again, teachers would complain that we were wild animals. Our dogs were the same way; they would bolt out of the house in the morning, pack up with others and head for the river. Usually they were back in the afternoon for naps under the porch and occasionally they’d haul up half a deer carcass and leave it by the back door. (Presumably as a gift for my mom: “Could you cook this? Medium rare?”) They would have puppies born in old badger dens, and the kids would have to dig them out and we’d give most of them away. Sometimes, even during the winter, our German shepherds would sleep outside in the snowbanks, noses tucked into tails, no doubt dreaming of their wolf ancestors.
But that was then, a different time. Now, semisocialized dogs have difficulty fitting into our more complex and increasingly less rural society. Like all wild things, they are smack up against our desire for order and civilized spaces.
It often does not end well for them. Again, according to Martin, most of the reported dog bites are from these “loosely connected” dogs. Of the 600 dogs brought in to the shelter and euthanized in one recent year, 550 fit into the category of under-socialized, half wild with no tags. An important side note: The dedicated staff at the animal shelter hate putting down dogs. It’s understandable that they are passionate about neutering, spaying and adopting.
So, what’s our responsibility as a society that cares for all life? First, of course, caring starts at home. We need to assure that our pets are socialized, spayed or neutered, tagged and accounted for. Next, the shelter does yeoman work at helping as many of these dogs as possible become socialized and good companions. Think about adopting one of them the next time you are looking for a dog.
Finally and practically, when you see a wandering dog, check to see if there is a tag. If so, help it out, call the owner. If there’s no tag and the dog is doing no harm, or not in harm’s way, best to let it be. They are smarter than we think — sort of wild animals trying to adapt to our world. If the dog needs help or appears to be dangerous, call animal control. The staff at the shelter will do their best to reconnect the dog to our world.