Cumberland County Sheriff’s Office is seeing success with its new animal control unit operations.
Community Relations Director Gary Howard said that the city of Crossville had one animal control person and the county had one full-time and one part-time. He said that the new operations both save time for the Sheriff’s Office on calls, as well as better protect the animals.
“We wanted to make sure that the animals were taken care of first and foremost,” Howard said. “And that we would secondarily be able to issue some type of justice issue to those that were harming those animals.”
Howard said that they have been able to hire an officer to serve in the animal control unit. He said that they’ve also trained the previous personnel to become special deputies who now have the authority to take action in animal cruelty cases.
Howard said that since the unit began work on January 1st, they’ve already taken in over 120 animals. He said that while the increase of intakes means they’re getting animals out of bad situations, it’s also created another issue.
“The animal shelter is full of animals now,” Howard said. “So we really need to get people in our community that are concerned about the welfare of animals to be contacting our animal shelter and adopting those animals as soon as possible because we have an overload of those.”
Howard said that the main thing the Sheriff and everyone involved wants to communicate is that they are doing their best to help those in the community, both people and animals.
“We want to take care of animals, we want to take of children, our citizens, we want to take care of everybody,” “And in the process of doing that, we sometimes have to make some necessary changes to be able to do that better. So we look forward in the future to being able to work with different groups and take better care of the animals, get them adopted and get them in good homes. And also be able to take care of the citizens that have got complaints on those animals. So hopefully in working together we’ll be able to do something really great for the community of Cumberland County”
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