Runaway piglets and llamas on the loose: Minnesota animal catcher shares his secrets

Bagley, Minn. – The call came in last summer from the Clearwater County Sheriff's dispatcher: "We got 10 baby pigs running down Hwy. 2."

Dan Ekre, Bagley's animal control officer, knew just what to do. Jumping into his rust-streaked pickup, he pulled up at the scene, where a sheriff's deputy was trying to herd the piglets away from traffic.

Ekre grabbed a bucket of dog food from the pickup bed.

"The deputy said, 'They're not dogs,' " Ekre recalled. "I said, 'They can't read.' "

Ekre scattered some dog food, the piglets couldn't resist, "and one by one I got them with a dip net," he said with a raspy laugh.

The 64-year-old Ekre, a sturdy, tough-looking former truck driver, has been picking up stray, lost and dangerous animals in Clearwater County for 15 years. After more than 30 years in the trucking business, his doctor told him he needed to find something that would be better for his health.

"The sheriff approached me and said, 'Danny, I've got a job I think you'd like,' " Ekre said.

Now he's got fresh air — it was 10 below zero in Bagley last week — and the kind of exercise you can only get from subduing everything from a lost cockapoo to a rabid bull tipping the scales at more than 2,000 pounds.

Ekre is employed by the city of Bagley, a community of about 1,400 residents some 255 miles northwest of the Twin Cities. But he picks up animals throughout all of Clearwater County, as well as a few locales in neighboring counties.

There's a lot of livestock in this rural part of north-central Minnesota, and Ekre sometimes sees more than he'd prefer, like the time he found 200 cattle scattered across 2 or 3 miles, grazing contentedly in a farmer's grain fields.

He brought in a few local residents on all-terrain vehicles and they got the cattle rounded up and back to their owner.

"He said, 'How did they get out?' and I said, 'It's your job to figure that out. I just bring 'em back,' " Ekre said with another laugh.

Growing up on a farm in the area, Ekre learned early on how to deal with animals of all kinds. The knowledge came in handy when he got a call for a llama on the loose.

"They're kinda mean," he said. "They bite and kick and spit." He wrestled with the beast "and finally I got a rope around his neck, and I got it around his nose like a calf halter.

"And I tied him to the truck and drove back real slow."

Not surprisingly, he gets a lot of calls for stray dogs. Ekre said he's never been scared of a dog, although he admits he doesn't like dealing with pit bulls. But you have to show them who's boss, he said.

"I've learned to read dogs quite well by their eyes and their actions," he said. "You can tell if they're gonna bite you." Ekre has several varieties of protective gloves, and he'll let a vicious dog bite his arm, which gives him an opportunity to subdue them while they're occupied with his arm. He said he's never been bitten except on his gloves.

"I use my head," Ekre said. "You can make a dog do anything if you grab that lower jaw." He also carries a shotgun and a tranquilizer-dart gun, but said he doesn't use them often.

Skunks are a common problem, but Ekre said it's usually because a property has too much garbage lying around. Get rid of the garbage, and it generally gets rid of the skunks.

The city has a pound in the woods on the edge of town. Ekre takes stray animals there and keeps them for five days. If nobody claims them, he tries to adopt them out. He said he rarely euthanizes an animal.

And the pound has an added benefit, he said: "If my wife ever kicks me out, I have a place to go."

John Reinan • 612-673-7402