Note to applicants seeking jobs in local law enforcement: Be ready to deal with four-legged perpetrators and victims

Security cameras helped nab a killer in Port Washington the other day. That wrongdoers can be caught in this manner is hardly breaking news in this age of burgeoning 24/7 electronic surveillance of public and private places, but this incident had some unusual twists. The murder weapon was a pickup truck. The victim was a whitetail deer.

    A West Bend man called Port police at 5:25 a.m. to report that his vehicle had collided with and killed a deer and, by the way, he wanted to claim the venison. The collision happened on South Beach Road next to the We Energies power plant—not a good place, it turned out, to stage such an “accident.”

    A power plant employee told police he had observed the truck waiting patiently for three deer to cross the road and then lurching forward and slamming into a fourth. The eyewitness account was confirmed by the plant’s security video. Instead of venison, the driver got a ticket for reckless driving.

    The case of premeditated deer killing by pickup truck was probably a first for the Port Washington Police Department, but its officers are no strangers to animal crime investigation. In fact, taxpayers would probably be amazed to learn the cost of law enforcement involving animals in terms of police hours, injury claims and incarceration (boarding). Suffice it to say, small town police work entails a lot of interaction with creatures that are not human.

    Ozaukee County Sheriff’s Department deputies had to deal with a case in April of a pair of pit bulls that were terrorizing folks in the Town of Saukville. So menacing were the free-running dogs that residents beseeched the Town Board for help. A woman told the supervisors a harrowing story of having to climb a tree to escape the snarling beasts—and this on her own property.

    The town does not have a police force or even a dogcatcher, so the best the board could do was to ask the county for help. Latest word is that deputies have informed town officials that the menace has passed; the dogs are now in the custody of a pit bull rescue organization.

    Welcome as this is for town residents, it is disappointing that it did not come with news that the dogs’ owner was facing some sort of punishment, a municipal citation at minimum, for allowing vicious creatures to be at large. In any ranking of nasty things you can do to your neighbors, letting pets notorious for clamping their jaws onto human extremities free to roam and intimidate deserves a place near the top of the list.

    In Fredonia, the animal problem is cats, not dogs. It became the Village Board’s problem when a citizen appeared at recent meeting to ask for action to deal with the village’s large population of stray cats. “There are wild cats running all over,” she said. “They are spraying my home and having a good old time yowling at night.”

    The trustees were sympathetic, but for want of a good answer tried to pass the problem off to the police. Village Marshal Mike Davel lobbed it back by pointing out that catching feral cats is something police are not really equipped or trained or to do. In other words, there’s a reason the term “herding cats” is synonymous with impossible tasks.

    The marshal also informed the board that there is no law against feeding feral cats. The question came up when a trustee reported that sort of misguided charity is going on in the village.

    The subject of cats that live outside and do not have owners is controversial, igniting a good deal of conflict among those who maintain the animals should be trapped and neutered and then allowed to lead their feral lives, others who like the trapping part but would make it a final solution by combining it with euthanizing the feral cats and folks who put out food for the wild felines.

    This editorial page has no intention of getting caught in the middle of a cat fight. We’ll just make the following observation: A report signed by the Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service states that feral cats spread disease and kill 3.7 billion birds every year. This pretty much tells us where bird lovers stand on feral cats.

     But there’s more data to consider. The report also estimates that feral cats kill 15 billion small rodents annually, which may soften the views of gardeners battling voles, gophers and chipmunks.

    Communities expect a lot of their police in dealing with animals, but cat control is clearly asking too much. On the other hand, just as Port officers apprehended a deerslayer, police are obliged to arrest anyone who tries the same thing with cats. Unsanctioned killing of cats, including feral cats, is a violation of state law.