While his college degree is in electronics, one glance at Ronald Butts’ job history shows that his calling in life lies outside the world of wires and microchips.

The son of longtime Dowagiac veterinarian Frank Butts, the Decatur man spent much of his youth pitching in around his father’s clinic, helping care for the beloved pets of families throughout the area.

While job-hunting shortly after his graduation from Southwestern Michigan College in 1991, Butts encountered a posting for a part-time position helping clean the kennels as the Cass County Animal Shelter — a job he took after his girlfriend joked it would be “right up his alley.”

More than 25 years later, Butts has recently taken over as “top dog” of the department.

“It is hard to believe I have made it this far,” Butts said, sitting in his new office Thursday morning. “I still love the job to this day. The day I stop enjoying it will be my last one here — and I do not see that happening anytime soon.”

Butts was named as the new director of the shelter earlier this month by Sheriff Richard Behnke. He succeeds his longtime mentor, Cassopolis’ Michael Grice, who retired in December in order to take a position on the county board of commissioners.

As one would expect from the son of a veterinarian, Butts has been surrounded by animals his entire life. Volunteering for his dad for years before he was hired part-time by his father when he 16, Butts helped out with the clinic as much as possible. During his time there, not only did he help take care of people’s dogs and cats, but also saw the occasional bird, reptile or even monkey come through the doors, he said.

“The care and well-being of animals has been something I have advocated for my entire life,” Butts said. “It is a passion of mine to see animals treated with compassion. They cannot speak for themselves, so we have to be there to protect them.”

After graduating from Dowagiac Union High School in 1989, Butts initially pursued a degree in animal science, following in his father’s footsteps. However, seeing the long hours that the elder Butts poured into his practice made him reconsider his choice, and he instead decided to study electronics.

Returning to the world of animals through the shelter in 1991, Butts quickly rose from being a part-time worker, helping to feed and clean the dogs and cats living in the kennel, to a full-fledged animal control officer, responding to complaints and bringing in stray dogs when necessary.

While canines have only bitten him three times in the course of his career, each stray dog call always presented a different challenge — such as one where he had to use a bag of licorice to coax a skittish dog into hopping into the back of his vehicle, Butts said.

“Each dog is a little bit different,” he said. “You do not know where they have been or what they have gone through. You have to handle each case with caution.”

On top of danger, Butts also encountered plenty of heartbreak in his career, from seeing animals that had been victimized by abusive owners to having to put down old or sick animals at the shelter.

To combat these issues, Butts plans on using his new position to help expand the shelter’s public outreach, something he has focused on the last six months before his promotion.

In order to promote greater awareness of the shelter and how to properly care for pets, Butts is looking to get his office more involved with local classrooms, talking with students about the work he and his officers do, he said. Butts visited a group of Justus Gage third-graders to do just that in December, and has reached out to the Dowagiac school resource officer in hopes of arranging similar stops in the future.

“It is something I really enjoy, though the kids will bombard us with a million different questions,” Butts said.

The new director is also hoping to expand on some of the partnerships the department has made in recent months in order to get more animals out of the kennels and into new families. The shelter currently works with humane societies in Midland and Kalamazoo to help expose its animals to more potential adopters, and Butts appears weekly on area radio station 98.3 to spread the word about which pets are available at the shelter.

These initiatives have helped drive down the shelter’s euthanasia rate by 10 percent over the past six months, with more than 60 pets from the shelter either finding new homes or transferring to one of the two humane societies since Christmas, Butts said.

Butts is also looking to increase awareness of the need for pet owners to get their animals spayed or neutered, as unintended breeding is one of the main contributors to animal homelessness. The shelter currently offers $50 vouchers to any county resident to help pay for procedures.

“As much as we are about law enforcement, we are also focused on education,” Butts said.