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On the way back to the shelter with the chocolate Lab, Vestal and Swartz pick up a second stray dog on the same block, a young shepherd-husky mix that looks quite at home lounging in the grass in front of a porch a young man is sitting on.

Swartz asks the man if the dog is his, and the man replies, “We don’t own him. We didn’t name him or anything.”

(A lot of people think, wrongly, that not naming an animal means you don’t own it.

“You feed it, you own it,” Swartz says.)

The dog looks quickly at the officers, then runs behind the house and slips through a hole in the fence into the backyard, where four other dogs — two more than the legal limit in Kansas City, Kan. — are outside.

The young man who lives in the house helps Swartz get the shepherd mix on a leash and, when asked about the other dogs, says two of them belong to his sister, who is coming to get them this evening. This, too, is not permitted, but the young man is polite, so Swartz takes down his information and tells him he will need to provide proof of license, rabies vaccination and spay/neuter records. (Kansas City, Kan., requires pets to be spayed or neutered unless owners get a special permit.)

Swartz does not issue a ticket but makes a note to follow up later.

Next, the officers stop at a house where a minister has been feeding a dog since the owner died before Christmas.

The old, overweight husky is not nearly as friendly as the Lab and the shepherd mix. It takes a control stick and both officers to capture him inside the fenced yard. As the officers struggle to get the dog up into a cage in the truck, the dog empties its bowels, soiling the cuff of Vestal’s trousers and Swartz’s shoe.

“(That) happens,” Vestal says with a grin.

Back at the shelter, each dog gets its picture taken next to a white board with an ID number. The photos are mounted in a glass partition near the front of the shelter, so owners can identify pets that have been picked up. The photos are also entered into a database.

All dogs and cats brought into the pound are scanned for a chip. Even if there is one, Swartz says, the tracking companies often can’t trace the animal, because the owners didn’t know they had to register the animal.

The young chocolate Lab has no collar and no chip. Still, the pound can’t put her up for adoption until three full business days have passed. Because it’s Tuesday afternoon, and weekends don’t count, she won’t be eligible for adoption until her ownership legally passes to animal control on Monday morning.

Inside her 4-by-6-foot cage in a long kennel filled with other dogs, most of them barking, the golden-eyed Lab paces and looks apprehensive, ears pinned back. And with good reason.

Although she has set off on a journey toward a better life, the journey will begin with a very long stay inside this cage.

•••

A few hours after the Lab got picked up, Karen Sands, shelter director for the Humane Society, got her first look at the new boarder. Sands was instantly optimistic about the pup’s chances of finding a “forever home,” as she calls it.

“She looked healthy, friendly and young. She came up to the front of the cage. She looked very desirable,” Sands said.

Sands, a medium-height, slender woman with long tawny hair, is a whirlwind of intense energy. She speaks rapidly and without a lot of aimless banter. Her phone buzzes constantly with text messages, which she often answers instantly.

Many of the messages are to rescue groups, local and out of state. They are Sands’ most valuable allies in her crusade to save animal lives. She works with a core of 10 rescue groups weekly and another 50 in the course of a year.

Sands has also established relationships with farmers who will take feral cats to keep as barn cats. She placed 305 feral cats in barns last year. The pound euthanized only three cats, for extreme sickness, compared with 691 cats put to sleep the year before.

There’s no time for messing around when you have to find homes for 30 to 40 animals in a normal week; once it was 50.

“I only have to place 17 next week. That’s a vacation,” Sands joked recently.

Only, if you know her, you know it wasn’t much of a joke.

Sands has worked for the Humane Society 16 years, 10 of them as a paid employee. She estimates she works 70 hours a week, sometimes answering texts in bed in the middle of the night.

“My husband asked me the other morning, ‘Who were you texting at 3 a.m.?’ ” Sands said.

It was a rescue group, naturally. She says she hasn’t had a vacation in years, although she has accumulated 80 days of time off.

If she sometimes seems on edge, her colleagues understand that her relentless drive is fueled by vast reserves of compassion for the four-legged creatures in her care.

When Sands is confronted by an aggressive dog at the pound that is growling at her, she says she takes a step back and just looks at the dog.

“Four seconds of looking and that’s it — I love that dog,” she said.

That makes it particularly painful when Sands has to let go of a dog that is just too aggressive to transfer or put up for adoption. On a recent walk-through, Sands pointed to a card on the cage of a wild-looking dog that had “PTS” written on it — put to sleep.

“He’s been here since Dec. 12. I kept waiting for him to ‘pop’ (relax). I think he was feral. It’s like trying to tame a coyote,” she said.

Sands, who lives in rural Leavenworth County, credits her special love for tough cases to her own dog, a 5-year-old pit bull that was used as a “bait” dog for other dogs to attack.

“Her face looked like hamburger when I first got her,” Sands said.

Sands named the dog Freckles because of all the scars on its face.

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