BY KEVIN SHALVEY

If you’ve lost your dog in Hopkinton, chances are you know Fred Finnerty, the Police Department’s animal control officer.

And he gets a lot of calls because there are about 1,320 dogs in town.

“Which is a pretty sizable population,” Finnerty said.

That’s about one dog for every four people living in town.

“It’s not every day, but I had 196 calls last year -- a mixture of dogs, pigs, cows, llamas, you name it. But no cats. I don’t do cats,” Finnerty said.

For the last four years, Finnerty has been on call 24 hours a day, ready to take care of lost animals in Hopkinton. He’s wrangled dwarf horses and has picked up two massive St. Bernards during a snow storm.  

“I’ve gotten calls at 2 in the morning, 6 in the morning,” he joked.

Because the police station doesn’t have facilities for the animals, Finnerty happily lugs them in his own Jeep -- with the rear seats removed -- back to his house for 24 hours.

“If no one calls during the 24 hours -- which is rare -- I bring them up to the Woodlawn Kennel,” he said.

At Woodlawn Kennel, on the Hopkinton and Warner border, dogs stay for a week and are then put up for adoption -- none of the animals are euthanized, Finnerty said.

There’s one part of the job that makes it a lot tougher -- dogs without identification, he said.

“It’s usually very simple if they have their tags and collars on them,” he said. “But I tell people my pet peeve is when people go through all the bother of registering them and then they don’t put the collars on them.”

The new identification chips -- much like Lojack locator for your car -- that are being put under dogs’ skin hasn’t helped much yet.

“Maybe only a dozen times have I found a dog with a chip in them,” said Finnerty.

Many times, the Hopkinton Police Department isn’t where owners look first, Finnerty said.

“A lot of times, we’re the last people they think of -- they call the kennels or the SPCA and don’t think of us,” he said.

For the Bow Police Department, there isn’t an animal control officer. Uniformed officers handle lost dogs, of which there’s about one a week, said Lt. Dave Girard.

The department has a set of cages behind the station where animals are put for a week before being shipped to the SPCA.

“Usually it’s a day or two and we’re able to reunite them with their owners,” said Girard.

On Wednesday, July 4, the department found a dog that stayed for longer, though, and inside the station.

“Ninety-nine times out of 100, somebody calls and they come down and pick up their dog, but this time they didn’t,” Girard said.

The dog was adopted a few days later, but not before being given preferential treatment -- it was allowed to sleep in the dispatch room, Girard said.

“It became a kind of mascot around here,” he said. “There was just something about it that was just really sweet.”