DALLAS -- A German shepherd had been seen with a broken leg sitting under a tree and Reid Koenig, a lead animal services officer with Dallas Animal Services, was on the call.
“Sometimes I get there and it’s nothing like I was told,” he said on the way. “Gotta roll with it, play it by ear.”
Sometimes when he arrives, there’s nothing there at all.
Pulling up on a street close to Mountain Creek Lake, he reached the address: No dog in sight. But there was a person.
“I called like a week ago!” the person yelled to Koenig as he approached to ask about the dog. The man said the dog had limped away days before and pointed down the street.
Regardless, Koenig had to follow procedure. There was a chance the dog could still be nearby. He started sweeping the neighborhood in his vehicle.
He scoped out the area, looking at gaps between the ranch-style houses to see where the dog could run if he ended up having to chase it. He also paid special attention to bushes and anywhere with shade where the dog might take shelter from the blistering sun.
After driving up and down a few streets, Koenig pulled over and started tapping away at his keyboard. He filed a report that the dog wasn’t there – the fourth such report since he started his shift.
“It’s not ideal to let all these calls last this long,” he said. “When you’re actually caught up on everything, it’s like boom, boom, boom.”
Based on city response time estimates for reports about injured animals, someone should have gotten to the dog within one day of the call being made. It had taken six.
Koenig said there wasn’t much he could do about it – they’re severely understaffed right now.
“If we’re down five officers, that’s 50 calls on the shift we can’t get to,” he said.
Dallas Animal Services only has eight officers who can work in the field at the moment. On Koenig’s shift this particular day, there would only be three to cover the whole city.
While driving to the site of the next service request, he talked about new hires he trained this last year, none of whom ultimately became officers. His most recent trainee decided to accept a lower-paying job, both because it was closer to home and for one other reason.
“Less dangerous,” he said.
Risks of the job
Koenig originally took on the job for a simple reason: He hates sitting behind desks.
A former paralegal, he knows he has other options that would pay more, but isn’t interested. He recently took a job at the city attorney’s office for a $20,000 pay bump. Five months later, he quit and returned to animal services, where he currently makes around $44,000 per year.
“I don’t think there’s one common reason,” Koenig said about why his other colleagues took on the job. One of those colleagues is his wife, who he met at DAS after he quit a different paralegal position in San Antonio.
He’s encountered more danger than love as an animal services officer.
Random drive-by shootings late at night, animal bites and discovering dead bodies are all notches he has on his belt as an officer.
One of the first things he does before he goes into the field to prepare for potentially dangerous scenarios is don city-issued body armor. He then latches protective tools onto it, including pepper spray, a bite stick, a baton and a tourniquet.
“A lot of this stuff I got myself,” he said. “The government will only issue what they say you need to get the job done.” Those essentials include the body armor, catch poles and nets, radios and body cams.
“They actually issued me the boots, which are pretty good. I just gotta get some more because they wear out pretty fast,” he said.
The gear can only go so far toward protecting him if things go south on the job. Calling for back-up would be difficult, if not impossible, because of the staffing shortage.
“Three officers, everyone’s out on a call, you need help,” he said. “They can’t just drop everything and come.”
On this particular day, though, there didn’t seem to be any reason to worry. All four of the calls Koenig had been on so far had ended up with no dogs in sight.
Suddenly, a call came in about two aggressive canines, one white one brown, in someone’s backyard in West Dallas. Koenig radios in that he’s on it.
Compassion fatigue
Upon arriving, Koenig got out of his truck to be greeted by two people on the front porch. They immediately pointed to their backyard – a dog was under the patio stairs and one was under their car.
Together with newer officer LaDonte Williams, Koenig started heading toward the back with a catch pole in hand. When he got to the patio he kneeled down to take a look.
Cowering under the stairs was an Australian Cattle Dog, white with brown patches and two different colored eyes, one blue one brown. She didn’t make a noise and didn’t seem too aggressive. But they needed to get her out of there – that’s the job.
After 15 minutes of struggling, Koenig was finally able to latch onto her with his catch pole. He turned to Williams as he pulled her out from under the stairs, who helped him carry her to the vehicle. It wasn’t pretty – she defecated on the way there out of fear.
When they went to check for the other dog under the car, it was gone.
“I feel like a lot of people think we hate animals,” he said on the drive back to the shelter, “We’re trying to do our best by them… but we have a finite amount of resources.”
One of the hardest parts of the job is that they have to euthanize dogs on a regular basis, he said, which can be emotionally traumatizing.
“They call it compassion fatigue, it’s a thing,” he said. “Some people can’t handle that.”
The shelter has been euthanizing more animals for space in recent months according to public data. In June, 56 dogs were euthanized for space. That’s up from 39 in May and six in April. More than half of them have been pitbulls and most of them are euthanized within a month of being brought into the shelter.
Reasons for this include a slow rate of adoptions and a “significant drop” in animal rescue providers pulling dogs from the shelter, according to DAS spokesperson Marlo Clingman. Slightly more dogs coming in is another factor, though not a major one.
And there was a recent distemper outbreak, which forced them to limit the amount of space available. This is something officers like Koenig have to always be mindful of whenever they bring dogs into the shelter.
One of the first things Koenig did with the dog when he arrived back at the shelter was give her a dose of DA2PP, the vaccine for distemper. After that, he started setting things up to bring her inside.
Koenig asked Williams to roll over a large tub to help transport the dog, who wasn’t letting him move her with just a leash. Williams rolled it over and tipped it in front of her and helped Koenig lift her into it. They then started moving her to her kennel.
After they got her in they started heading back out to their trucks. This job was done, but they were on the afternoon-evening shift. They’d be going until midnight.
They both had something unexpected they could look forward to though.
Koenig had just received a text from a colleague saying they were getting a pay raise, which was later confirmed by his superiors.
“That’s something, Maybe that’ll help.”
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