Officials talk about ordinance process after recent incident
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Sarah Rutherford, who said her previous flock of more than 30 chickens was nearly wiped out by a neighborhood dog, has a new flock with 42 birds, thanks to donations from folks throughout Oglethorpe County. The Lexington resident holds the only chicken to survive the recent attacks. (Dink NeSmith/The Oglethorpe Echo)
Read more about the laws about dogs here.
Sarah Rutherford woke up to the sound of her dog barking on the morning of March 24. Grimm, a blue heeler mix, wanted to go outside.
“I thought maybe there was a possum or something on my front porch,” she said. “So, I let him out to go chase it.”
Instead, Grimm went straight for the Rutherford’s chicken coop and chased out what she believed was a large, white pitbull.
The two fought for a while before Rutherford called Grimm back, but the damage had been done. Rutherford said the other dog killed a hen and seven 8-week-old chicks.
Rutherford said she thinks the same dog attacked twice more over the next two weeks at their home in Lexington’s Meadow Lakes neighborhood. It was scared off by her husband Dylan the first time, but on April 3, it killed 27 more chicks, a duck and a rooster.
Incidents like these are not new for Oglethorpe County residents.
Sheriff David Gabriel said his office has a stack of dog complaints that at one point was over an inch thick. Capt. Mike Tyndell said the Sheriff’s Office has received about 10 calls in the past year about dogs in Meadow Lakes alone.
In 2021, the Oglethorpe County Board of Commissioners approved an ordinance concerning nuisance animals. Any animal that attacks a person, their property or their animals is a nuisance animal, and its owner is in violation of county law.
“Nuisance animal is a criminal ticket,” Gabriel said. “It goes before magistrate court. It’s held as a criminal liable ticket because you’ve damaged somebody’s property.”
Gabriel helped write the ordinance and said his once inch-tall stack of complaints is now one-sixth the size.
However, getting a ticket written is not easy.
“It’s just like any other criminal action,” Tyndell said. “You need enough to say that beyond a reasonable doubt that’s who it is.”
In Rutherford’s case, she said she thinks the owner of the dog that attacked her chickens belongs to a neighbor. Tyndell said she is “more than likely” right, but he can’t issue a citation until the identity of the dog and its owner is verified.
“There’s a difference between having evidence that those are the dogs and ‘those dogs just roam around, go with those,’” Gabriel said. “How do you know that? Articulate that for me in a way that I understand why we should believe that that happened.”
Rutherford said her family installed a camera after the initial attack, but it hasn’t yielded enough proof.
“We did get a very blurry image of the dog,” she said. “It was not a great image, but it was enough to tell that it was a large white dog.”
Tyndell said the image wasn’t provided to the police.
There was a storm on the night of the last attack, which Rutherford said knocked out the Wi-Fi, leaving the camera inoperable.
“We didn’t get anything that night,” she said.
Rutherford, who moved with her husband and three children to Oglethorpe County from the Atlanta area about six months ago, said Tuesday that residents from around the county had donated 42 chickens to her family since the last attack. She also said she has spent $800 to build a reinforced coop, which she called a “fortress.”
But the problem remains.
Rutherford expressed frustration that the dog hasn’t been labeled a dangerous dog, a designation outlined by Georgia’s Responsible Dog Ownership Law passed in 2012.
A dog is considered dangerous if it punctures a person’s skin, attacks a person or kills a pet animal. Owners of dangerous dogs must abide by strict guidelines that require posted signage on their property, among other things.
That decision comes down to Jeff Sharp, the county’s code compliance officer.
Sharp said he defers to the Sheriff’s Office for investigation and cases are passed on to him as needed, but said he’s dealt with only two or three dangerous dog cases.
Gabriel said Sharp, if he’s available, is the “primary investigator for dangerous dog ordinance,” and dangerous dogs and nuisance animals are “apples and oranges.”
Sharp said that like the nuisance animal investigation, there’s not enough evidence to pin Rutherford’s incidents on a specific dog.
“We have no physical evidence that the dog that she claims did it, did it,” he said. “We have no pictures or anything. She just knows that her chickens are dead.”
He said that photos, videos or an eyewitness account would be enough to write a citation.
If someone feels they or their property are under threat of someone else’s dog, Sharp advised them to react as they see fit.
“If the dog is off their property, on your property, you have the right to protect yourself and your property,” he said. “Whatever they deem necessary.”