Monroe County Animal Services has a new interim director, but it’s a familiar face to many local dog lovers.
Becky Gifford took over at the beginning of this month as the county’s interim Animal Shelter Director, replacing Dawn Kennedy, who had filled the role for about 10 months. Gifford began working for Monroe County Animal Services in July 2019, when Kennedy hired her as an administrative assistant. Gifford is joined at the shelter by Carlos Santillan, who has served as Animal Control Officer for just under a year.
Gifford was born in Detroit, Mich. but raised in Clearwater Beach, Fla. and considers herself a Floridian. Gifford moved to Monroe County in 2011 and was a stay-at-home mother to her two daughters, Parker, 20, and Piper, 15, and one son, Holden, 16, prior to being hired by the county. Gifford, who began volunteering at the Monroe County shelter several months before she was hired on staff, said she’s always loved dogs. “I’ve always had compassion for animals, especially dogs,” Gifford said. “When my kids were young, we always had dogs. They’re just part of the family.”
Gifford said Kennedy “mentored” her from the moment she began working at the shelter and said she intends to maintain the strong relationships with Middle Georgia rescue groups that Kennedy cultivated during her stint. “We’ve had a great rapport with the rescues, and they’re still pulling from us basically weekly,” Gifford said. “She (Kennedy) introduced me to most everyone in that circle. So it has been a smooth transition.”
Gifford said her normal day typically begins when she checks the shelter’s answering machine where citizens have left overnight messages about dogs roaming unattended. Once she’s responded to those calls and determined a course of action for checking on the welfare of the loose dogs, she goes to work messaging rescue groups and fielding questions from the public, often via Facebook, about the availability of the shelter’s dogs. Gifford said she does everything she can to ensure that dogs taken in at Monroe County Animal Services find a good home. “I’m basically a dog salesman for lack of better words,” Gifford said. “We do everything within our power to make sure that the dog gets either pulled by a rescue or adopted. We have dogs back there from November. When we post a dog that we pick up, there’s a five-day stray hold. And what that means is that after five days, if you have not re-claimed your dog, if you have not called us and said, ‘Hey, that one’s mine. I’ll come and get it.’ Then that dog becomes our property. And I don’t know how other counties do it, but people think that means after five days I’m putting this dog down. That does not happen here.”
Gifford said Monroe County maintains the label of a “no-kill shelter” because its euthanasia rate stays under 10 percent. She said the only time a dog is euthanized at the county shelter is when it has been deemed “dangerous” or “vicious” because of attacks on people or other animals. “Those cases, they’re a liability,” Gifford said. “I can’t adopt that dog out because now we can’t trust it. So in those particular cases, we do have to euthanize. But we go above and beyond to get them all rescued out.”
Gifford said it’s not uncommon that she sheds tears on the rare occasions that a shelter dog is put down.
“We cry when it happens,” Gifford said. “There are dogs that come in and you get attached to them and they become permanent fixtures here. And some of them can handle dog jail and some of them go kennel crazy, and you can see them deteriorate. And if they’ve been here long enough, they become more and more aggressive. And so we have had a couple of cases of that kennel-crazy, where we’ve had a dog for so long and he’s used to you but he’s aggressive now. And we’ve had to let go a couple of those. And it’s like losing a family member. It’s painful.”
Gifford said the Monroe County shelter stays extremely full, having already housed 90 dogs since the beginning of 2020 and averaging 450 dogs housed annually. The most that the shelter has space for at one time is 23 dogs with the possibility of housing two additional ones outdoors during the warmer summer months. Gifford said, “There’s no shortage of people that want to surrender their dogs or people who dump their dogs, and we pick them up.”
And the staffer responsible for picking up those dogs is Santillan, a 27-year-old Chicago native. Santillan, who has family in the South including in Atlanta, moved to Georgia five years ago with wife Kenia, whom he met while she was attending school in Chicago. Since moving to Georgia, the Santillans have had two daughters, Abigail, 4, and Isabella, who is 15 months. Although they lived in Macon, Santillan commuted regularly to Norcross, where he worked as an electrician for Intelligent Energy Optimizers (IEO). Santillan said he was beginning to tire from being away from his young family so much and said a friend alerted him last spring to Monroe County’s need for an animal control officer as longtime shelter employee Alfred Taylor transitioned into a new job as grounds supervisor at the Monroe County Recreation Department. “I got in touch with the director here, and she (Kennedy) interviewed me,” Santillan said. “I guess she saw the love I have towards the animals and the patience I have towards dogs. I grew up with animals. We’ve always had a dog in the house. We’ve had four at the same time and to have four dogs in a city like Chicago, it’s a lot. We had two Siberian huskies and then two little Pomeranian-looking dogs.”
Besides going on calls to wrangle up loose dogs, Santillan is also primarily in charge of feeding and exercising the dogs, chores he performs with assistance from various volunteers, Monroe County Jail trustees and probationers needing community service hours. Santillan said of his various unpaid assistants: “They do help a lot. They walk the dogs, they clean out their bowls, clean out their kennels, clean the yard up, just spend time with the dogs, so the dogs know they’re not alone.”
Although Gifford said she hopes to have another staffer in place soon to fill her vacant administrative assistant position, she said volunteers like her husband Chad remain critical to the shelter’s continued success. “We have a great volunteer base,” Gifford said. “We have a great support community, but the majority of them work. So on weekends, this place is a madhouse with volunteers, which is fantastic.”
