It takes two trips and four tries before Buster, a snarling black and tan mutt with a chow's dark tongue, can be lassoed and caged.
Navajo Nation Animal Control officers Hansen Tungovia and Stacey Daw stalk the dog with ropes at the ready as Buster's owner, Katherine Robbins, tries to lure the wary animal toward its demise.Finally, trapped in a darkened shed, Buster is roped. He succumbs in a thrashing plume of dust and growls and spittle.
Like thousands of dogs on the Navajo reservation each year, Buster is being captured so he can be killed. Like the others, he is unregistered, unvaccinated and unsocialized. He has not bitten a human, but he is showing a taste for sheep.
A neighbor has reported Buster chasing her sheep, and Robbins has watched from her front porch here in the hills outside St. Michaels as he tails the herd.
Sheep on the Navajo reservation are money. Buster has to go.
"He might start killing those little lambs," Robbins says as she signs the papers authorizing Buster's death.
The Navajos have an epidemic of reservation dogs, an estimated 140,000 strays who move singly and in feral packs across the sprawling three-state reservation.
The dogs are not only a nuisance and a threat to livestock but also endanger people.
The tribe's animal control division answers about 300 complaints each year about severe dog bites. There were 22 bites just last month.
Most are not life-threatening, only painful - a chunk of a thigh taken by an angry neighbor dog or a child's cheek sliced by a nipping mongrel unaccustomed to play. Others are gruesome and nearly fatal.
Two years ago, a 45-year-old man walking home in the early morning hours in the community of Cameron was set upon by a pack of six dogs. By the time neighbors came outside to see what the barking and growling was about and were able to chase them away, the man was critically injured. He spent three months in rehabilitation.
A hotel manager in the Monument Valley town of Kayenta complained last summer that packs of hungry dogs were circling tourists in the parking lot. Boarding schools in almost every region of the reservation have reported dog packs prowling their campuses.
Rounding up and killing the dogs would not be impossible, if enough money was available to pay for the sweeps and space was available to dispose of their carcasses.
Mike Halona, whose job is to control the pet population on the reservation under the tribe's Department of Fish and Wildlife, says occasional community sweeps remove as many as 200 unwanted dogs in a weekend.
But the task runs into the roadblocks of tribal budgets and tribal culture.
"You're looking at 25,000 square miles, you've got three officers and two vehicles and one animal shelter," Halona says, "We can't do patrols. We can only react when something happens."
The department's staff has been cut from seven to three in four years, and its budget is cut about 10 percent a year. This year, the department does its work with $110,244 and, in a year of declining tribal revenue, is facing another proposed 10 percent cut.
The Animal Humane Association has told Halona that, based on the reservation's size and population, his budget should be about $1 million.
Another impediment to collecting the wild and unwanted dogs is the lack of places to dispose of them. Once a week, the officers at the small, seven-kennel Fort Defiance Animal Shelter give lethal injections to the dogs and a few cats that have not been claimed or are being killed because they have bitten someone.
Each year, disposal amounts to between 4,000 and 5,000 animals. Most of the landfills on the reservation have been closed because they are full, and trash-hauling companies will not accept dead animals. Staffers drive a load of dead dogs to the Gallup landfill once a week.
Halona has been offered an incinerator by the Indian Health Service, but his proposal to burn the dead dogs met stern opposition from the Navajo Environmental Protection Agency.
Dogs have a shallow history as pets on the reservation. As recently as World War II, the reservation economy was based al-most entirely in sheep raising. Dogs were workers, herding the sheep and keeping predators away. They did not have names, were not allowed in the hogan and ate scraps or hunted for their food.