The Fentress County Sheriff’s Office launched a dedicated animal abuse hotline to handle a rising number of livestock and domestic pet complaints across the county.
Fentress County Sheriff’s Office Chief Deputy and Acting Sheriff Hunter Fowler assigned two investigators to monitor the new reporting system daily. The department created the dedicated line to streamline the intake process and reduce the strain on patrol officers responding to non-emergency situations.
“We’ve got many complaints from the county regarding animals,” Fowler said. “And that’s been something that we’ve kind of tried to step into more and more, taking care of these animal cases, which can be pretty time-intensive and really labor-intensive to officers. So now that we have this hotline, it kind of helps us, you know, go directly to the source and we’ll get better information, better feedback from the county that way.”
Fowler said residents can submit tips anonymously by calling the hotline, sending a text message, or emailing the department. Fowler said callers have the option to restrict their phone numbers when leaving a voicemail.
“So if you see something going on at the time, like an animal at large, that’d be a case where I’d suggest that somebody would call dispatch,” Fowler said. “If there’s an animal that’s, you know, maybe tied up to a tree that doesn’t look like it’s had food or water in a week or two, that’d be something that we’d like to see kind of come through the abuse hotline. You know, kind of keep people’s names out of it, but keep us, you know, make sure that we can focus our attention on what we need to.”
When submitting a report, individuals need to provide the specific address and the number of animals on the property. Fowler said the department also accepts photographs of the suspected abuse, provided the images are taken from a location where the person is legally allowed to be.
“So what we really need, we need the number of animals that they know is on the property,” Fowler said. “We definitely need an address because if we don’t have an address, we can’t get there. They have the option to be able to send pictures. As long as somebody’s sending a picture from somewhere they’re allowed to be, I mean, we can’t be telling people to go up on people’s property and sneak in pictures of people’s animals. But I mean, if you’re driving by, you see a horse that looks like it hasn’t eaten anything, it’s in a dry pasture, there’s no grass, snap a picture of it and send it to us just as long as you’ve got an address and we’ll be out there.”
The county has experienced a steady stream of abuse cases over time, but the caseload recently blossomed as the department began diving deeper into livestock and dog investigations. To handle the specialized nature of these calls, the investigators monitoring the hotline completed agriculture training to learn how to properly grade livestock and determine what constitutes criminal charges.
“So if somebody’s found guilty, I mean, they’ll definitely have court time,” Fowler said. “We’ve had a couple of cases where people spent some significant time in jail and then if the case is severe enough, they have their rights to animals taken away. So if we catch somebody even with a chicken after a point where they’ve been charged, they’ll go back to jail over that.”
The department is currently promoting the hotline through social media and radio advertisements, with plans to publish the information in local newspapers.