The man who helped wrangle seven cows off East Martintown (including “one angry mama”), who captured a runaway emu and helped put an end to $5 photo ops with a baboon has left after 27 years with the North Augusta Department of Public Safety.
Animal control officer Michael Strauss retired from NADPS March 24 to step into the role of chief operations officer at the South Carolina American Legion headquarters in Columbia. He starts there full time after Memorial Day.
Strauss left the military in 1994, and “the damn Yankee” found his way from upstate New York to North Augusta the next year.
Strauss started with the department by filling in on nights and weekends as an on-call animal control officer to help give the officer at the time a bit of a break.
He then got involved in training one animal control officer after another. It wasn’t then the most rewarding type of police work, he said, and it saw a lot of turnover. Strauss ended that pattern when he took on the role in 1997 and stayed with it for 25 years.
NADPS Animal Control officer Michael Strauss retired March 24 after 27 years with the city. He will be taking on a full-time role with the South Carolina American Legion after Memorial Day.
“He did a lot of things that people didn’t understand or know about,” said NADPS Chief John Thomas.
Thomas said that Strauss was “well-versed” in animal control and helped to organize and improve the city’s shelter. “The numbers showed us that Mike was doing a great job of trying to adopt dogs out.”
Strauss had started his role researching the laws around animal control and the fee schedule. At the time there was no database to keep track of repeat offenders — and so no way to keep tabs on the fees owed to the city by these offenders, he said.
He also worked to improve the animal shelter, making it more dog - and people - friendly, especially through noise reduction. Dogs feel stress with excessive noise, said Strauss, and by addressing that problem it meant the shelter could hold the dogs longer and give them a better chance for getting a new home.
Not that it was always dogs.
“We’ve had some really unusual things happen,” said Strauss.
A cattle truck got into an accident on East Martintown once in the early 2000s. Its doors opened and out spilled seven or eight cows. It was a couple of days before officers were able to round them all up, he said.
Another time it was an emu. “And they’re taller than me! And they can run faster than us,” said Strauss. Eventually, he nabbed the bird with a lariat and learned in the process about the stress system of emu — you need to cover their eyes to calm them down.
Yet another time it was someone’s pet baboon and a makeshift photo booth with it.
“A lot of people, sometimes they get these pets and they don’t have any idea what their capabilities are, they haven’t really thought it out,” he said. “I mean, a baboon, they’re pretty cute as a baby but they grow up and they can grab your hair and probably have no problems pulling it out by the root in a large chunk.”
“He’s helped us in so many ways, just being in the right place at the right time,” said Chief Thomas.
On a table in Thomas’ office is a book containing more than a century of history about North Augusta’s public safety department.
Its chief author? Michael Strauss.
Strauss compiled the photographs brought in by residents at the city’s 2006 centennial celebration and then spent four years tracking down those who could help him identify the people in them.
He also gave over hours of his time in going through the minutes of council meetings from those first turn-of-the-century years, uncovering all kinds of trivia.
“He would keep the riff raff on the Augusta side because he lived right there on the bridge,” Strauss said of a former police chief who lived in the Highlander building (now relocated to the side of its former site, which was in the middle of what is now Georgia Avenue). The ne’er-do-wells? “They got promptly sent back to Augusta,” he laughed.
Strauss also came across a couple of duels and a 1929 incident when a former police chief was fined for “riding drunk on horse.”
“Just to see the different cars and the different gun belts and the technology, how it changed," said Strauss.
NADPS Animal Control officer Michael Strauss retired March 24 after 27 years with the city. He will be taking on a full-time role with the South Carolina American Legion after Memorial Day.
Now, “the damn Yankee” (Strauss laughed, recalling the name he was given at first), is headed to Columbia and the headquarters of the South Carolina American Legion.
North Augusta formally recognized Strauss just before his final day at NADPS when Mayor Briton Williams called for “the man of the hour” at the March 23 council meeting: “Come on down, sir!”
“We had the best man for the job — he cares about animals, he has a way with people and we have big shoes to fill. We’re going to miss him,” said Williams.
He then turned to Strauss, “You have been committed to this city, you have been committed to these citizens and you’ve done it honorably.”
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