Without animal control, Twiggs residents left to fend for themselves

Four years ago, Crystal Vargas saw a need in her community, so she did something about it. 

“There was dogs all over the place,” she said. “Nobody was doing anything about it. You call the sheriff’s department, they say there is no animal control. You call for help from surrounding counties, there was no help.”

She founded Island Breeze Animal Shelter to serve Jeffersonville and the surrounding communities, and since then, she estimates she’s gotten hundreds of animals adopted and thousands transported to other shelters that had the space for them.

It was a start, especially considering the shelter is funded from donations and out of her own pockets, but locals say that dogs wandering Twiggs County — both loose pets and the stray or injured — is a problem that still needs a solution.

“Everybody wants animal control,” she said. “We brought it to the commissioners before, and the commissioners do not want to make a change.”

Rural communities like Twiggs often do not have functioning animal control agencies. They require facilities, vehicles, equipment, staff and more to operate as intended, making them a costly endeavor. 

According to data from the Georgia Department of Agriculture, there are about 170 municipal or county animal controls or shelters. Around 100 of those are on the county level, meaning there are about 60 counties that may not have access to official animal services. 

In Georgia, when an area doesn’t have a designated agency to handle animal-related issues, it falls on the sheriff’s department. The problem with that, Twiggs County Sheriff Darren Mitchum said, is that they don’t have the tools that are necessary to safely handle animals. 

“You gotta try to catch them,” he said. “Now, if you can get them caught, now you gotta be able to transport them, and you gotta have a place to transport them to.”

Mitchum explained that not having an appropriate facility alongside animal control is like having a sheriff’s office without a jail.

As it stands, the sheriff’s office can call the Department of Natural Resources if a larger animal problem comes up — their office has gotten calls about everything from horses and goats running loose to alligators roaming near people’s homes — but that doesn’t help with the stray dog issue.

Twiggs is sometimes able to enlist the help of larger, nearby counties with animal control services, like Bibb County, but those larger shelters have their own problems. 13WMAZ reported in August that Bibb’s facilities had no vacant cages to store dogs and cats in, so they had to turn away a number of animals.

Mitchum has publicly advocated for establishing an animal control agency at county commission meetings, similar to other public comments, it didn’t seem to lead anywhere. 

At a county commission meeting last year, he suggested that leftover funds from the American Rescue Plan Act in the county budget go toward establishing an animal control. In the end, the funds went toward offsetting payroll costs, which does potentially open room in the budget for additional spending, but plans for that haven’t been made yet.

The topic of animal control frequently comes up at commission meetings. 

One citizen brought her concerns to another commission meeting during the public comment period. She said she called local law enforcement when aggressive dogs came into her yard and threatened her own dogs, and she said she was told she could shoot them. 

“Is there anything that the county can do to eliminate this issue? I don’t want to kill anyone’s dog,” she said. “I think everybody needs to be responsible for their dogs.”

After she suggested opening an animal control, Chairman Ken Fowler said, “I don’t know who you’d get to do it.” The speaker was told to continue involving law enforcement if she knew whose dog it was.

Mitchum confirmed that people who feel threatened by dogs are allowed to shoot them, but he emphasized that it isn’t something he encourages. 

“I’m not advocating that people take a different spin and think that I’m telling folks to go around killing dogs,” he said. “But in that particular scenario, you are within your rights to do so if you had to.”

Stray and missing dogs are discussed almost daily in local Facebook groups. Earlier this month, one poster said there was a dog in her yard that had killed five of her chickens. Some dogs are posted, presumed missing, but they are known dogs that belong to neighbors who let them wander outside their home.

“Let’s start somewhere,” Mitchum said, emphasizing that establishing animal control is no small feat. “I’m not saying you gotta build a state-of-the-art thing. But let’s start somewhere.”