Emergency responders (and not many people really think of animal control officers as emergency responders) go along the streets for most of the time with low-key duties, an opportunity to pick up information and skills while keeping disorder down to a dull roar, but now and then they are flung unexpectedly into life-threatening emergencies that may be entirely outside their experience and training.
Luckily, I left animal control before the popularity of pit bulls, but I’ve seen videotape of what can happen. An AC officer, a small young black woman, evidently down in the rural South, had a television cameraman with her as she went on her calls. She could not have expected that stopping at a tumbledown cabin with a slatternly big white woman would end up immortalized, stereotypes notwithstanding.
The woman sicced her pit bull on the officer. It leaped for the officer’s throat but couldn’t quite get that high, so tore chunks of flesh out of her breasts. The cameraman, who was a little slow realizing that the officer was in trouble, taped the attack, but then put down his camera and grabbed a club to beat the dog off. By that time the dog owner had completely lost control of her dog and the officer was in shock. What would be effective protection short of a gun or a suit of armor? I’m pretty sure the dog-owner was convicted of assault with a deadly weapon, but strange things happen.
Nothing so dramatic ever happened to me. In fact, some days I didn’t even see loose dogs to impound and spent most of my time hanging warnings about barking dogs on the front doors of people who were not at home. One day I was sent to a house where the owners had tied their dog on a metal flex cable out front and then left. The dog had gone under the porch where it had wound under and over the support system until it was so tightly and complexly webbed that it couldn’t move and had become hysterical. Neighbors were gathered but none knew the dog owners or where they might be. A knife wouldn’t cut the cable and none of the neighbors seemed to have wire-cutters either.
Luckily there was a service station on the corner of the block and the operator “loaned” me wire-cutters for a $5 deposit. The dog was screaming, thrashing as much as it could move and thereby tightening the web. I would have to crawl in and cut the cable as close to the dog’s head as I could but it was trying to bite anything that came near it. I put my loop/pole over its head and slid under far enough to reach the cable, so close that my glasses were speckled with dog spit, but with the pole propped so the dog couldn’t slash my face when it was cut loose. Just as I was extended as far as I could and was barely able to get the cutters around the cable, I felt my wallet being gently slipped out of my hip pocket. Cutters went through wire, dog took off running, catch pole fell off, neighbors melted away ... no wallet. At least when I took the cutters back to the service station to redeem my deposit, I had lunch money. They also stole my beloved Ranger hat out of the pickup where I’d left it on the seat.
Sometimes I had a bad attitude. Once, visiting with a complainant on her front porch while her neighbor craned from next door to find out what she could, the woman asked me what happened to unclaimed dogs at the shelter. I made a graphic throat-cutting gesture. The neighbor stormed inside, outraged at my insensitivity and telephoned the powers-that-be to demand my immediate dismissal. I got a good lecture.
Another woman answered the door laughing. The street had been reported over and over as a hangout for loose dogs and I’d driven down it several times but never saw one dog. This woman had the explanation, since she could see the street from her kitchen window. She said that she would notice that all the dogs sprawled comfortably on the warm pavement would suddenly rise at once and move to their backyards. In a few moments my truck came by. Clearly they knew the sound of the motor and what it meant.
One dog would consistently run to meet the truck. I’d picked him up after a dog fight in which he was the loser. In the time we were waiting for the attention of the veterinarian I petted the dog, for lack of anything better to do, and talked to him. He considered us “bonded” and was overjoyed to see me. Anyway, for rural dogs, a surefire “catching” technique is to pull up alongside the dog, open the door and invite “wanna go for a ride?” They nearly always do.
Sometimes it was hard to figure out what the complainant’s problem was. A call complained of a “dead rat” in a certain intersection. I went and looked, but saw nothing. The next day the same complaint came back, so I checked more carefully -- under cars and along the gutters. The third time the complaint came through the mayor’s office. I took my garbage sack out into the intersection and walked back and forth over every inch. At last I found a very flat mouse. Feeling sure the complainant was watching from a nearby single-occupancy hotel, I mimed a great show of shock and dismay -- then elaborately put the postage-stamp-sized mouse in my big sack. That did the trick.
Another complainant had to go all the way to the top as well. It was a man who claimed there was a dead dog so shocking that he had thrown up and his wife had gone into hysterics. It was still out there, lying on the parking strip, and he could not bear to go near enough to cover it up. He had called it in, but days had gone by. His next call was going to be to the media.
The location turned out to be on one of the little short snippets of street nearly cut off from access by the freeway built through town and therefore nearly impossible to find, and the dead dog really was rather shocking. The dog had been run over from behind, which squeezed all its organs -- still arranged as they had been inside the dog -- out through its mouth so that they lay ahead of the dog. I still can’t understand quite how it happened.
The more dead animals resembled their live selves, the more disturbing they were. If they were completely scrambled, I didn’t find them very upsetting. If I had known the animal, I couldn’t help grieving. Once I “impounded” what must have been a puppy, but it was reduced to a round flat furry disc with one puppy foot sticking out the side. No one could ever have recognized the original animal.
One of the most difficult dog-identification incidents came after I was education coordinator. Oregon had a beloved governor with a troubled adult son who got into many very serious scrapes. One of the things that helped him stabilize was his childhood dog, now ancient but still faithful. Somehow the dog escaped. The governor’s wife, a gracious and admired person, came out to the shelter to see if we had impounded it. Carefully she went through the kennels and read through the descriptions of dogs people were holding at home, but she couldn’t find the dog. Her son was growing more distraught, she said, but he didn’t come along. She repeatedly visited over several days.
In the meantime we had impounded a nearly hairless, staggering and limping little old dog wearing a harness but with no tags or ID. Nearly blind, it was impounded standing patiently in front of a stone wall, evidently waiting for the wall to get out of the way. Since we assumed the dog had been hit by a car, it was put into a sick bay kennel. When it was unclaimed after the legal holding period, it was euthanized.
A shelter attendant, sorting out impoundment slips afterwards, had the collars and harnesses from the dogs on her desk. She had talked to the governor’s wife and with horror she recognized the description of the harness. The dog had been identified in terms of its youth, quite different from the dog we impounded, and the wife had not known there WAS a sick bay nor had she thought of her dog as sick. (The limp was arthritis.) It was a terrible mistake.
We talked about what to do -- should we tell the family? They would go on wishing and hoping for a long time if we didn’t. If we just kept quiet, no one would know. Except us. And we already felt awful -- keeping it to ourselves would just make us feel worse. So I called the governor’s wife. She was not gracious about it and I didn’t blame her. “I know how you must feel,” I offered.
“I assure you that you have no idea whatsoever,” she snapped. Of course, she was quite right.
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