TALES FROM A DOG CATCHER by Lisa Duffy-Korpics

This is the only book  -- besides mine -- about dog-catching written by a dog-catcher that I know of .  Copyright in 2009, it is already remaindered, but you can find remaindered and used books easily by Googling or by checking http://www.abebooks.com or http://www.alibris.com or Hamilton  http://www.hamiltonbook.com/hamiltonbook.storefront  which is where I got this book.  There’s also Daedalus, http://www.daedalus-books.com/

but they tend to skim humanities cream.  (That’s where I found “The Boy and the Dog Are Sleeping,” the first Tim Barrus book I read.  NOT a dog-catching story.)

Should you look for this book?  If you like this cover, you’ll like this book, which is just like this funny lovable upside-down dog.  Lisa has published stories in the “Chicken Soup” series of books, so that’s another indicator.   I self-publish my “dog catcher book” (“Dog Catching in America”  www.lulu.com/prairiemary/  )  and my style is far more outrageous than Lisa Duffy-Korpics.  Editors would likely trim my wings.

That’s a product of the context.  Lisa was very young, working for a small town police department as a civilian employee in a Hudson River Valley town.  As a backup she was sometimes a school crossing guard or a matron for female prisoners.  She refused to go into a house that had a bat in it.  Her transportation was a station wagon.  She had enough time in her schedule to drop by for lunch with old lady cat hoarders.  There were no drug labs, murderers, or African lions.  (There WAS a wallaby.)  In the end she became a social studies teacher and married -- I suspect the lucky guy was the wildlife rehabilitator who helped her with a one-legged duck.

Portland, Oregon, in the Seventies, was a different kettle of fish.  (I never impounded a fish but we did some cruelty inspections of icky -- technical term -- fish.)  I dashed from one call to another, which was just as well since my ideas for filling up free time usually got me into trouble. (Like the time I handed out license applications in Laurelhurst Park and started a riot.)  We made formal arrests and helped the coroner get bodies into zip-up bags because our uniforms were washable.  We were part of the sheriff’s department and drove pickups with canopies.  (Now Portland AC is part of environmental services and drives expensive compartmented trucks, but they still wear sheriff’s uniforms.)  I was the first woman and I was over thirty, a former teacher.

Given all that, I only caught Lisa out once -- she described a calico cat as a male, but all calico cats are female: the gene for the third color is on the second X chromosome.

It’s as though “Anne of Green Gables” had written this break-your-heart, warm-your-heart book, earnest, positive, and gently funny.  That one-legged duck had to be kept overnight and would NOT stop quacking!  A rather fabulous Marilyn Monroe clone complained about raccoons coming to her window to watch her undress.  The first story is about a feral white dog protected by ancient nuns in the woods near the convent.  There are often quick turns you don’t expect:  like the woman who thought a stray dog was the reincarnation of her husband, but allowed it to be adopted by someone else because she’d already lived THAT life.  Now she was ready for Merry Widowhood!  

The men Lisa worked with were like the men I worked with -- maybe quite a lot like emergency responders and law enforcers everywhere.  I don’t know whether they are that way because that type is attracted to the work and successful at it (I’m excluding the ones who are there for the power to abuse) or whether the work makes them the way they are, creating smooth stones by knocking off the edges.  They often harassed and mocked her in a friendly way, but also stepped in to protect her -- even sending her home now and then.  But not bothering to tell her about a big hole she’d scraped in the seat of her pants when sliding down a steep hill to keep a band of turkeys out of traffic.

One tension in community animal work is obvious in the difference between the law-enforcement police/sheriff angle and the humane-society animal welfare side.  Less obvious, but perhaps more relevant, is animal control as defined by the shelter full of animals -- which is the usual focus of outsiders because they love the dogs but the public hates the expense as well as the similarity to a jail -- and ACO responses IN THE NEIGHBORHOOD.  That’s where the action is.

That’s why Lisa’s book is the same as mine but different from mine -- because our neighborhoods were different, though Portland was divided up and assigned as though each “beat” were a small town.  And that’s why Lisa’s book is just like mine, because a good officer of any kind gets to know the people and animals and develops strategies for handling them as well as a network of allies.  This book could not be written by a shelter attendant.

Inevitably, a good ACO ends up in classrooms and dealing with the media.  It’s tough to get the real story across to a young reporter from a big city who thinks impoundment is cruelty.  They just can NOT get their minds away from familiar and reassuring images.  Maybe that’s why I especially liked Lisa’s darkest and most fanciful story in which a dog is the villain, a big monster of a dog who lures innocent strays into the highway where they are crushed while it watches from the barrow pit.  It’s a Stephen King tale.

I want to talk to Lisa, so I called the Lyons Press, which is a subsidiary of the Globe Pequot Press in Connecticut.  (It has ties back to Montana, but that’s irrelevant.)  The weather has closed them down for the day.  (Montana giggles.)  I’ve tried to find Lisa’s phone number via the Internet with no success.  Maybe she’ll Google herself and find this.  I hope we make contact.  There are a LOT of female dogcatchers out there now, but not many of either gender actually gets around to writing a book.  There is no class or even video that can teach a person how to be a good dog catcher, but maybe a book like this comes close.  It’s the attitude.  (Even upside down, like the cover model, counts.)