KPD Chief: Register your dogs for your benefit

Kasson Police Chief Josh Hanson addressed concerns about dogs on the loose in the city at a recent council meeting.
“There has been some social media chatter about dogs running loose,” he said. “We’re well aware of it. We issued a lot of citations related to it.
Hanson said they tried to seize some dogs initially, but since 2019 they’ve run into a problem: no vet clinics will take them.
“Our local vet clinics don’t want to house dogs.I understand why,” he said. “They don’t know the vaccination records, so that’s why they don’t want to.”
Hanson said they ended up seizing some dogs and finding them a place in Chatfield.
“It’s not ideal, but it worked for a temporary solution,” he said.
Prior to 2019, Hanson said they were able to drop dogs off at K-M Regional Animal Hospital, which has since seen new ownership that decided to end the ability of the city to bring dogs there.
As social media has grown in popularity, Hanson said it’s been a good tool in trying to reconnect owners with their animals.
“We didn’t have a place to house dogs, and that’s kind of when social media kind of took off and we were able to actually find owners pretty fast — just for loose dogs in general,” Hanson said.
The chief said if community members find the dogs, they will typically hold on to them until the animals are reconnected with their owners. However, sometimes they spend some time at the Kasson police station.
“There’s been a couple that we brought back to the office and had tied up when we were waiting, but it is a difficult thing… we don’t want be holding on to dogs, we don’t have to,” Hanson said.
One of the best solutions is for people to register their dogs, he said, which makes it much easier for the police to connect straying animals with their proper owners.
It is also required by the city; owners can be cited for not registering them.
“We can write a citation for it and that is something actually in 2026 we started cracking down on,” Hanson said.”We’ve been pretty lax on it and we’re taking more aggressive enforcement action on it now — especially if it’s a repeat offender.”
While there are punitive penalties for not registering a dog, Hanson said it’s ultimately a benefit for owners to do so.
“I think that’s the number one benefit of the registration, is us being able to track down owners if we have a dog loose,” he said during a phone interview.
Asked during the meeting if there needs to be any changes to the ordinance, Hanson said they may need “to make a couple of tweaks.”