It’s 6:45 a.m. and Barbara Prada’s phone is ringing. The no-nonsense, longtime Edgartown animal control officer (whose name is pronounced like an Edgartown Pray-dah, not a handbag Prada) hasn’t even had a cup of coffee when she finds out that there’s a dog on the loose, headed straight for the Edgartown School.

“Story of my life,” Ms. Prada said. “It hopped right on the bus.”

“I’ve had dogs turn themselves in . . . they would just show up at the door.”

Jeanna Shepard

“I’ve had dogs turn themselves in . . . they would just show up at the door.”

Jeanna Shepard

That was Monday, Jan. 28. It might as well have been any other day in Ms. Prada’s 37-year career, during which she has impounded 5,883 dogs, about half as many cats and her fair share of ferrets, birds and other unidentifiable fuzz balls. But on Feb. 8, that three-decade career comes to a close when Barbara Prada will retire.

“You’ve earned it,” selectman Margaret Serpa said when Ms. Prada recently told the board the news.

“Five-thousand, eight hundred eighty three dogs,” selectman Arthur Smadbeck observed. “That’s more than a dog a foot, for a whole mile.”

Ms. Prada cited her full pension and ever-growing list of physical ailments when asked why she decided to retire. Last year she fell off a stepladder, found out she had drop foot, and had her left knee replaced. Although Norman the Superknee, as she calls it, has allowed her to still impound 60 dogs and register five donkeys, five oxen, three llamas, and 1,773 chickens (the animal control officer doubles as the animal inspector), she’s now almost 63, and 37 years of being on call for 24-hours, seven days a week, takes its toll on the most super of humans, even with the most super of knees.

“I need some me time,” Ms. Prada said. “And I need to get this other knee replaced.”

A lifelong Islander who traces her roots back to the original settlers, Ms. Prada had spent seven years working at a kennel before she decided to apply for the Edgartown animal control officer job. The ability to work hands on with animals — and receive full benefits as a town employee — had Ms. Prada thinking she had hit the jackpot. That didn’t last long.

“I’ll tell you, the first month I almost quit,” she said. “I had no clue what I was getting into. I had no clue about doing dog bites. I had no clue how to do a quarantine . . . I think I was a couple months in when the state finally sent me a letter saying, haven’t you had any dog bites in the last few months? And I was like, what are you talking about?”

Eventually, though, she settled into the job. The animals were the easy part. It was the humans who were a problem.

The phone is always ringing.

Jeanna Shepard

The phone is always ringing.

Jeanna Shepard

“I’ve had people spit in my face,” she said. “Crumple up their leash law violation and bop me off the forehead with it. One person put his fist through the screen door when I was there in the middle of the night about his dog barking. I was a whole different ball game for people. They were used to just letting their dogs run loose.” The numbers corroborate Ms. Prada’s assessment. When she started in 1986, there were 269 dogs impounded, the most on record. By 2000, the number had dwindled to 162. By 2018, it was 56. Ms. Prada said one change is responsible for the decline.

“Effective enforcement of the law,” she said. “And that’s one thing I said when I took this job — I’m going to be fair. I even fined one of my selectmen once. I don’t do a good-dog, bad-dog law. If it gets picked up, it’s coming here.” By here, Ms. Prada means the Bow-Wow Inn, the small, aging town dog pound on Meetinghouse Way. Although she only has one indoor cage, she often has far more than one indoor animal. Tenants can include cats, rats, bats, ferrets, parrots and of course, dogs. And the dogs can range from cuddly pit bulls to feisty chihuahuas to wildly aggressive St. Bernard-bloodhound-rottweiler-chow mixes (according to Ms. Prada, yes, they exist, and yes, they are scary). That’s the part of the job she minds the least. “I love all the animals I pick up,” she said. “Animals are straightforward. They are what they are. There’s no hidden agenda anywhere.”

Animals have also always loved her.

“I’ve had dogs turn themselves in,” Ms. Prada said. “Yeah, they would just show up at the door.”

One dog — a golden lab named Eddie — used to turn himself in so often that he knew where Ms. Prada lived. Eventually his owners move away from Edgartown. That didn’t stop Eddie.

“He would turn himself in from Oak Bluffs,” Ms. Prada said. “Just couldn’t stay away.”

The same can’t be said for the owners. One time Ms. Prada got into work in the morning and saw that someone had broken into the pound, freeing four dogs — including one that was under quarantine. As the day progressed, three of the dogs came strolling back. When the fourth one didn’t appear, Ms. Prada made her way to its owner’s home.

“When I opened the door, there he was, with his dog right next to him,” Ms. Prada said. “The police arrested the guy. I didn’t get it, he’d already paid hundreds of dollars in fines. I guess he just couldn’t afford one more.”

One story still makes her chuckle. She once received a panicked call from a group of drunken teenagers about a jaguar roaming around in their backyard. Ms. Prada didn’t think much of it until she started getting calls from the neighbors reporting the same thing. When she eventually went out to check on the animal, Ms. Prada couldn’t help but laugh. “It was a really big, fat house cat,” she said. “This grown man was running as fast as he could in the other direction.” As tough as Ms. Prada is on dog owners, she has always followed her vow to treat them with respect and impartiality.

“It does you no good to pick sides,” she said. “If you get an incident with a dog, there’s usually two different stories, and I figure somewhere in the middle is where the truth is. And empathy, you also need a lot of empathy for this job.”

Over the years that sense of empathy has often turned into friendship. It’s what she’s going to miss the most.

“There’s a lot of people when I first started who couldn’t stand me,” Ms. Prada said. “And now we’re friends. I’ll go do barn inspections or whatever and I’ll end up sitting and chatting with the person. And I’ll go and quarantine their dog and sit with them for awhile. I’ll miss that. And the animals. I’ll miss the animals, too.”

This story and headline have been corrected from an earlier version which mistated Ms. Prada’s age and the number of years she has worked for the town.