Cleveland Animal Control Officer Jenna Halaska cruises the streets of Glenville on a sunny afternoon in June, looking for a reported stray dog. It seems hopeless. There are lots of places for a scared animal to hide.
“Where could you go in a matter of five minutes?” she mutters. That’s how long it’s been since the radio call came in.
She rounds a corner onto East 99th Street and something on a shaded porch catches her eye. She stops the truck, rolls down the window and calls out brightly, as if speaking to a child, “Hi! You live here?”
A Great Dane lifts his enormous head and stares at her quizzically. His mottled gray-and-black coat blends in with the shadows where he’s lying.
Halaska calls dispatch to ask the size of the reported stray. Real big, she’s told. She grabs a snare pole and a long, stiff leash from the back seat, climbs out of the truck and says, “Hi, honey wunny!”
She keeps up the baby talk as she approaches the porch and tosses some treats. The dog stands, sniffs them, gobbles them down. His ribs are visible. He stares at her, waiting for more. He remains calm as Halaska slips the leash over his head and immediately walks with her down the porch steps, all legs and hip bones.
When she opens the driver’s side door of her truck, he tries to climb in. His trust clearly won, Halaska lifts his lanky body into a compartment in the back of the truck. He barely fits, but it’s air conditioned, and the ride to Cleveland City Kennel won’t take long.
Good boys, good boys, watcha gonna do?
The Cleveland Division of Animal Care and Control responds to calls about four-legged and winged creatures in places they don’t belong within the city limits. The animal control officers play a bingo-style game based on past years’ apprehensions. The board includes pig, horse, coyote, donkey and bearded dragon. (Halaska’s “dream call” is for a tiger or lion.)
This year, the city handed off responsibility for nuisance wildlife — your skunks, groundhogs and the like — to a contractor, Freeman Nuisance Animal Removal and Remedy. Between May and the end of August, Freeman removed 1,134 critters from private properties and helped 142 owners with simple repairs to try to keep new squatters from moving in, according to Animal Care and Control.
That leaves the staff more time to focus on dogs.
Cleveland City Kennel on Detroit Avenue can accommodate about 150 dogs, and it’s at or near capacity most of the time. (Cats are taken to the Cleveland APL.)
Animal control officers like Halaska are on the front lines. They’re called to assist with dogs at the scenes of fires, medical emergencies and arrests. They pursue dogs that are running loose, sometimes appearing terrified and sometimes like they’re having the time of their lives. They frequently encounter dogs that have been neglected or abused, that are emaciated, living in filth, tied up in yards in the heat and cold, or tied to fences and abandoned, or already dead. They deal with owners who make excuses or scoff at them and drop the occasional threat.
The work can take a toll.
“To be honest, I bury it,” said Halaska. “That’s sad to say, but that’s the only thing you can do working in this field. … I just bury it and bury it, and then one day I’ll just end up crying at home and then go back to it the next day.”
Some dogs stick with her. Like Mandy, whose owner had ground down her teeth — probably as a punishment but who knows, Halaska said. Upon rescue she was somehow still a happy, loving, trusting dog, but the stress of shelter life proved too much for her. She grew anxious and restless. The staff decided that euthanasia was more humane than forcing her to keep living in a small kennel, waiting for an unlikely adoption.
Halaska saved Mandy’s collar and got an image of her tattooed on her arm.
The calls she hates the most, however, are the ones that end with the owner asking her to take the dog and euthanize it. If the shelter has a kennel available or if a local rescue organization can take it, and its health and behavior are suitable for adoption, it will get another chance. But when that’s not the case, that dog spends its final hours confused, scared and surrounded by strangers. (Animal Care and Control put down 1,090 dogs in 2025, according to testimony presented to City Council during budget hearings. About 10% were “owner requested.”)
“That’s the most heartbreaking thing to me,” Halaska said. “Every person should be there for their dog in their last few moments.”
She finds some solace in helping people who come to the shelter to adopt. Watching a dog leave for a new life with people who love it “is the greatest feeling in the world.”
‘The dogs just don’t stop coming’
Animal control officer Kara Barbosa is driving through the Mount Pleasant neighborhood when a man flags her down. She recognizes him.
He has a dog on his porch, he says. It has water and is not abandoned, he stresses, as if concerned that Barbosa will see it and take it. But he could use some more food. Barbosa explains that she’s not carrying any in the truck at the moment but will try to swing by later with a bag.
People have called about the man’s dogs before, she explains as she pulls away from the curb. “He doesn’t take care of his dogs the same way I do,” she says. But he means well and he’s trying, and helping him is easier, and better for the dogs, than hauling them to the already crowded shelter.
“Most people want the best for their animals,” Barbosa says. “Maybe they’re uneducated [in pet care], or maybe they’re struggling. … Even if there’s a violation that I can technically see, if I can just help somebody keep their animals, that’s very rewarding to me. There have been times where I felt like my dog was all I had, and I would hate if somebody took that away from me just because I was less fortunate.”
People sometimes report their own dogs as strays, Barbosa said. In some of those cases, it’s not from indifference or frustration, but love.
“They’re in tears and they’re saying, ‘This dog just walked into my yard,’ and I can tell that it’s a lie,” she says. Meanwhile, the dog is pawing at the person or scratching the door and whining to be let back in.
She delicately tries to get them to admit it’s their dog by explaining the mandatory three-day stray hold, during which it cannot be fostered or adopted. The hope of a quicker transition to a new life sometimes gets the owner to confess and sign the dog over to the officer.
While grueling, those scenes are still easier than dealing with the people who don’t care.
Earlier this year, she spotted an Akita running loose and caught it. The dog was microchipped, so she was able to return it to its owner. The woman complained about her “escape artist” and asked Barbosa to take it. Barbosa explained that the shelter was full, and the woman relented and kept the dog.
A few weeks later, she responded to a call from someone in the same area who had trapped a stray in their yard. It was the Akita. She was skinnier and had wounds on her ears that flies were attacking. “It was like after I left her house that day, [the owner] just never let her back inside,” Barbosa said.
Fortunately, the dog recovered in the shelter and was adopted quickly.
Many aren’t so lucky, especially among the breeds often referred to as pit bulls. Too many people in Cleveland are breeding pitties to make a quick buck (the city does not require a permit or license), or just failing to get their dogs spayed and neutered, Barbosa said. Many of those puppies end up in the shelter sooner or later.
“We don’t have the option to say, ‘Oh, we’re full, we can’t pick up any more dogs today,’” she said. “The dogs just don’t stop coming. It’s crazy the amount of dogs that are just running around loose all the time that we just pick up every day.”
‘A positive part of the cycle’
Halaska delivered the Great Dane she found to the Cleveland City Kennel, where he was examined by four staff members who baby-talked him through all the poking and prodding. He remained calm and cooperative. He was malnourished and his ears were filthy, but he appeared to be in good health, all things considered.
No one came looking for him. He was taken in by Mutts in a Rut Rescue, a nonprofit group that helps fight shelter overcrowding by placing unclaimed dogs (and cats) in foster homes and finding them new, permanent families. They named him Doug. He spent a few weeks in a small facility run by someone affiliated with the rescue, then a volunteer named Heather took him in.
He was “a perfect gentleman,” Heather told Signal Cleveland. He was house trained, knew “sit” and understood what “no” meant. He wanted to play with Heather’s other dogs, but they seemed intimidated by his size (114 pounds and gaining when she brought him home in mid-July). He was her shadow, following her everywhere in the house, parking his rear end on her lap when she sat. All signs pointed to him having lived in a loving home before ending up on the streets of Cleveland.
On Sept. 3, three months after he was rescued, a woman drove in from Indiana to adopt Doug. She and her husband adore him, Heather said.
Heather has fostered dogs for 15 years and stopped counting around 75. Many people have asked her how she does it. Doesn’t she fall in love with them? Doesn’t it break her heart to let them go?
“Of course they take a piece of my heart when they leave,” she said. “But you know what? My heart is big enough that they can all have their piece, and I can still have enough left to give to another one. And I get to see how happy the dog is, how happy the family is, how everybody flourishes, and [then] another one gets pulled from the shelter, which makes room for another one to have more time. So it’s that cycle. You have to be a positive part of that cycle.”
Cleveland City Kennel and Mutts in a Rut are looking for volunteers and fosters.
