Community Corner

Who Is Dale Sloat?

What makes Hopatcong's animal control officer risk his safety? It's more than his love for animals.

"I am only one, but still I am one. I cannot do everything, but still I can do something; and because I cannot do everything, I will not refuse to do something that I can do."
—Helen Keller

The words hang on the cluttered corkboard at Hopatcong's animal pound. Dale Sloat put them there. And while they weren't meant to serve as corollary to his animal control career the way your friends use Facebook to relate quotes to their lives—like Al Pacino's "Any Given Sunday" halftime speech or just about anything Yogi Berra has ever said—Mary Koegler believes they could.

Koegler was at a crossroads two years ago. The longtime Hopatcong resident had just finished community service, most of which she spent at the pound. She needed a job, something that would stick. So she called Sloat. "And this is the only job I've had this long," Koegler said.

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During her time caring for the pound's dozens of cats and dogs, Koegler has gotten to know Sloat—the closest thing Hopatcong has to Noah—as well as anybody. They share a love for animals and early-morning cigarettes. They talk about life and her daughter and how a 550-pound bear ends up in hibernating in an .

But not even Koegler knows exactly why Sloat, 61, does what he does—why he returned to a job that stole his finger, why he's OK with wrestling rabid raccoons, why he's able to refrain from going Mike Tyson on people who abuse animals while seething on the inside.

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Koegler knows something, though.

"He's just Dale," she said. "I don't know what else to say about him."

*

Animal control wasn't always on Sloat's radar.

His first love? Art, which took him to the West Coast and Europe, crafting presentations for big-money clients such as Canon while he owned Dale Camera Graphics, based in Manhattan's Flatiron District. His office housed 20 employees and 5,000 square feet of photography equipment. The business thrived throughout the 1980s.

Then Sloat was double-whammied. The recession of the late-1980s coupled with the proliferation of computers caused businesses to gravitate toward cheaper, simpler PowerPoint-style presentations, Sloat said. In essence, Dale Camera Graphics turned from lion to dinosaur in a few years. And then it turned to dust in 1997 when Sloat didn't have the heart to lay off employees who had worked for him since the beginning. "We all walked out together," he said.

It was little comfort. Sloat was distraught.

"I had lost my baby," he said. "Depression hit big-time. I sat at home. Couldn't get out of bed for three months."

Then his wife, Jan, had an idea. List what you like. We'll talk to the pros and cons. You have to do something. It wasn't long until the pair realized animals were Sloat's next biggest passion, which gave Jan a second idea: a career change. Her husband could try animal control. After all, she had recently seen an advertisement for a class in a County College of Morris newsletter. The pair would take the class together.

Sloat couldn't fathom a career change at first. But he relented. He ended up getting the class' second-highest score, he said. The top mark? That went to Jan.

Soon Sloat was applying for entry-level animal control jobs. His first score came when interviewing for a nights-and-weekends position in Randolph. "You don't walk on your knuckles!" Randolph ACO Norma Jacobs told Sloat. "You're hired!"

About six years and several stops later Sloat wound up working for Hopatcong. But not before a cat's scratch led to a fever and Sloat losing the middle finger on his right hand.

*

As Sparta's animal control officer, Sloat each day would walk past the crate of a feral black cat, which would claw at anything close. He eventually decided it needed to be euthanized. So he slipped on a pair of extra-thick gloves, picked the cat up with one hand and a needle with the other. As the needle neared the cat, it bit into Sloat's right knuckle, through glove and skin and bone. Three hours later Sloat, whose hand had swollen, was admitted to Newton Memorial Hospital where he'd stay for two weeks before doctors released him when his fever broke.

But there was a problem. His hand was still the size of a catcher's mitt. So Sloat—without even stopping home—drove straight to Morristown Medical Center, where doctors immediately admitted him again, this time draining more than a cup of fluid from the infected area, causing him to stay at the hospital for several more days. The swelling was gone. The finger? Useless. "Couldn't move it," Sloat said. "It just stayed straight. At the knuckle joint, the abscess had eaten up all the cartilage."

After two ineffective surgeries and months off the job, Sloat demanded the finger be amputated.

And that wasn't the worst part, he said.

The worst part was he couldn't sue for malpractice because, even if he won, repaying Workman's Compensation for the ineffective surgeries and the time he was out of work, coupled with lawyer fees, would put him in thousands of dollars of debt.

*

The ordeal might have been enough to steer someone else to a safer profession. Not Sloat. Born and raised in Brooklyn, Sloat would often come home with stray animals.

"[My father] would get rid of them somehow," he said. "And I'd come back another day with another one."

And it's that fearlessness that led him to confronting possibly the biggest animal he's encountered in Hopatcong about a month ago.

When a cable repair man found a 550-pound bear staring back at him in a borough man's basement, it was Sloat who took charge, calling in the state Division of Fish and Wildlife to handle the beast, which nearly trampled him after it was hit with a tranquilizer dart and led authorities on a three-hour chase through streets and woods.

That wasn't Sloat's closest call, though, he said.

"This bear did not want to go near anyone," Sloat said. "I've been out in Hopatcong where vicious dogs have been worse. The dogs will come at you. The dogs will try to eat you."

Years ago a Hopatcong man shot his Bullmastiff with a target arrow after it swiped a chicken off his dinner table. Sloat was called in to deal with the animal, which was angry and hobbled. The man was charged with animal cruelty.

Sloat said the dog dragged him for about 20 feet before he could latch onto a telephone pole, safely removing the arrow and loading the dog into his van so it could be taken to a veterinarian once it was tamed days later.

*

Incidents like those are what drive Sloat, his friends said.

Roxbury Animal Control Officer Sue Blanchard remembered when Sloat helped her remove raccoons from a man's boat after Blanchard had surgery.

"They had shredded the guy's boat," she said. "Destroyed wires. Dale jumped in, and you hear mother going crazy. Then I hear him yell, "I got her," and he starts pulling out the babies. I'm sitting here helpless and he was just awesome."

John McWilliams said Sloat "is kind without being blind."

"He doesn't do it to prove a point," said McWilliams, owner of Paws-itive Experience Pet Services in Rockaway. "He doesn't do it to show off. He doesn't do it to be the biggest voice in the room."

Then McConnell thought for a second.

"He does it because he's Dale," he said.


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