Shelter warden who rarely euthanizes earns Ohio honor
CIRCLEVILLE — Marc Rogols, a bear of a man with a long goatee and a penchant for camouflage, crouched and nuzzled the cold and shaking little beagle that had just arrived at the shelter.
“Ooooohhhh, don’t be scared,” Rogols crooned to the dog, lowering his gravelly voice to soothe and not scare. “You’re OK now. You want a treat, girl? Yeah, you’re OK.”
A retired plainclothes supervisor with the State Highway Patrol, Rogols credits the discipline from that previous life with helping him turn around the once-failing Pickaway County Dog Shelter, so much so that the Ohio County Dog Wardens Association honored Rogols last month as the best in the state for 2017.
On his first day on the job four years ago, Rogols called a meeting — for his one employee and one fulltime volunteer.
“It wasn’t much of a staff meeting,” he said with a shrug and a smile. “But I had something to say.” He told them he would essentially run the shelter like a patrol post.
“We got organized. We started documenting everything. And I used my law-enforcement experience to handle the violations and enforcement side,” he said. “We were changing how we did business ... and people weren’t going to call us dog killers anymore.”
Mark Kumpf is the dog warden in Montgomery County and president of the state association. He said there was no one thing that made Rogols a clear choice for the top honor, but instead, the totality of his characteristics and achievements stood out.
“Mark is engaged, active and has such an energetic personality,” Kumpf said. “His ability to make connections with folks, developed over a lifetime in his community, has led to success. When everybody knows your name, and your shelter is ‘Cheers,’ it’s easier to do.”
Rogols, a 58-year-old Pickaway County native who left the area only when his patrol career took him elsewhere, shrugged off the praise. He pointed to the deputy dog wardens sitting not far from him, one of whom had just brought in that beagle, which had been wandering around an apartment complex’s parking lot on a zero-degree day.
“I might be the dude with the ideas,” Rogols said, “but these guys are the ones taking care of these dogs, day in and day out, instead of sticking a needle in their paws to get rid of them.”
A decade and a few dog wardens ago, the Pickaway shelter was a small, concrete-block garage where as many as 80 percent of the dogs that came in were euthanized. A new, 42-kennel, $380,000 building was dedicated in 2009, funded entirely by donations. By the time Rogols came aboard, the euthanasia rate had dropped to 40 percent. His 2017 numbers are still preliminary, but out of almost 400 dogs to pass through, only two were euthanized.
Rogols credits Partners for Paws, a local nonprofit group that was formed more than a decade ago to raise money for that new shelter but now has a mission to help fund it. The organization supplements Rogols’ roughly $174,000 budget, most of which comes from fees and donations.
Rogols reports to the county commissioners, who control the budget and have helped him add employees and raise their pay. Partners for Paws raises as much as $40,000 a year to cover all of the shelter’s veterinarian bills and more. That allows Rogols to treat and save sick and injured animals and find them homes.
JoEllen Jacobs, the organization’s president, said not all the previous dog wardens either could or would find a way to do that. Instead, at least one just regularly told volunteers to make a list.
“We hated that. We knew what it meant,” Jacobs said. “It meant, Give me a list of how long each dog has been here so we can pick the ones that must go.’”
She said Rogols euthanizes now only if a dog is too aggressive or its medical issues are too severe for the animal to live with or to be fixed. Otherwise, he gives up on none of them. Old, blind, deaf, three-legged — it doesn’t matter. Rogols is determined to find every dog a loving home.
“His decision to not euthanize just adds more work for him and his staff,” Jacobs said. “Realistically, it would be a lot easier to put the dogs down. But Marc doesn’t stand for that.”
When shelter volunteer Sherri Rarey nominated Rogols for his statewide honor, she wrote about how he visits classrooms to teach kids dog safety, and how he built a rescue and foster network, how he has improved public relations, crafted a social-media presence and boosted both dog adoptions and office morale.
It was his tender heart, however, that struck her the most: “It’s not uncommon to find Marc sitting in a kennel comforting a scared or lonely dog.”
And so it was that he went out of his way Thursday to comfort that little lost beagle. It turned out, she had an implanted microchip. Within a couple of hours, Winter had been retrieved and was on her way back to the Groveport home she had wandered from in November.
“That’s a good day,” Rogols said. Then he paused and thought about that. “They’re all good days.”