Beware of coyote traps, if you walk your dog around Heath Lake in Columbus’ Windsor Park.

The pest control company the city hired to catch the nuisance animals there is using leg or “hold” traps with metal jaws that snap shut on the canines’ paw. A Denewood Court homeowner found a neighbor’s dog caught in one Sunday night.

Bob Thompson, whose backyard faces the park, said he let his own dogs out to relieve themselves around 8:30 p.m. Sunday when he heard an animal in distress.

“I heard the most excruciating scream of an animal that I had ever heard,” he recalled. “It sounded like a dog.”

He ran toward the noise, and using his flashlight found a dog with a green collar caught in a leg trap.

“It was dark. I didn’t see anyone else around,” he said Tuesday, standing by the spot about 20 feet off the park’s walking trail, near an earthen dam the path skirts. “I approached the dog, and tried to release him, but he growled at me.”

Looking back toward the trail, he saw another man with a flashlight coming, so he called out, asking whether the stranger had a cell phone.

“He walked over and said ‘Bo!’ And it was his dog,” Thompson said.

The owner was able to calm the animal so Thompson could get close enough to open the trap: “His foot was bleeding, and it took probably about three or four minutes to free him from the trap because I didn’t know how the trap worked.”

When Thompson got back to his feet, he triggered a second trap, he said: “I had scrunched my toes up when I sat down, so it didn’t get my toes, but it got my shoe.”

The trap had been set in a depression beside a tree, where a dead limb had toppled. It was not there Tuesday. “Evidently they’ve moved them now, and I don’t know where they are,” he said.

He kept a cell-phone photo of the trap, and forwarded the image to the newspaper.

It’s illegal for owners to let dogs roam unleashed in the park, but some still do. Thompson often warns people about the law, because dogs running free sometimes kill ducks and other waterfowl that frequent the lake.

Still he felt the traps he found were so close to the walking trail that even a leashed dog could have triggered it, as pet owners frequently leave the trail there to let their dogs urinate in the trees.

Pat Biegler, head of the city public works department that hires trappers for nuisance wildlife such as coyotes and feral hogs, said leg traps are more effective at catching coyotes, which are smart enough to learn to avoid a big cage trap. “We didn’t have any luck with that at all,” she said of the latter.

So the contractor’s using leg traps, “but we’ve been very careful about the placement and talking to the neighbors,” she said.

The city will look into posting signs at the park warning people about the traps, she said.

Coyotes have become a frequent and recurring issue in Columbus, where the opportunistic predators prowl even heavily populated areas. Three have been trapped in the Overlook neighborhood off Wynnton Road at Buena Vista Road.

Windsor Park residents complained in October that coyotes were being seen more frequently there.

The city in November announced it was hiring a professional trapper to catch the animals.