The papers left from animal control are the hardest to discard. Tons of clippings from when I was there forever after, all of them joking and punning until we get to the genomic revolution and French philosophy.
I wasn't much moved by the idea of gender equality though I was the first woman hired in Portland. There had been one other in Washington County, adjacent to Multnomah, much younger. She left when she sprained her back. At first I was just trying to survive and some hoped I wouldn't, including competing women. My closest competitor turned out to be a felon. The window into law enforcement (we were part of the sheriff's department) was a preoccupation. Always black people were on my mind.
They told me Civil Service was for me, because otherwise I get fired. The panel that interviewed me had a black man on it and it was clear he was on my side as a fellow minority. Also, he had a black man's romantic notions about "Indians" and I'd spent more than a decade with the Blackfeet. He loved it when they asked (thinking of my back) whether I could lift a heavy dog and I said because I'd been married to a taxidermist that I could lift a deer, couldn't lift a cougar because if I picked up one end the other was still on the floor, and I had to skid bears.
"Could I shoot?" they asked, thinking of picking off coyotes out at the airport where they got on the runway. I told them honestly that in summer I shot a ground squirrel every morning to feed the pet eagle and fox. When the serving officers went to a shooting range to qualify, I did better than the others except for a guy who had been a Vietnam sniper.
This was the beginning of wrestling with projections. I never was the competent cowgirl they thought of, who were the creation of scriptwriters and organizations meant to establish a mystique of technique that would make people have to qualify for inclusion. There was a whole dogma about how to ride a horse -- actually competing dogmas, most of them intended to overcome muscle instincts so as to impose intellectual rules. I never was able to do that. When I rode a horse, I just sat there and tried not to fall off -- not to understand which foot was the horse's lead.
The boss at first was a scandal, very Trumpy in a Latin/Hawaiian way. #metoo would faint. Then came Burgwin, an old cop who thought all the time and pulled me into his ideas. He'd yell, "Scriver, get yer butt in here!" and talk about the pesky obsessed women who thought they were helping animals as "getting their tits in the wringer." I learned to ignore all that stuff and listen deeper.
He's the one who thought of education for the officers, who at that point were the stereotype of dog-catchers. He pressed me to write a handbook and I did. I thought "animal" and brought in the Portland zoo veterinarian and the primate center honcho. They sneered at us, but we got smarter.
Texas A&M is the only place I know of that grants a degree in animal control as a branch of police work. The difference from humane society work is not that the focus is on community law rather than the justice of compassion, which is true, but rather that humane work is usually focused on a shelter where the animals are brought, with a few investigators who work specific cases. Animal control goes into the neighborhoods and homes to keep order and to see what's really happening.
We did run a shelter and we did kill excess animals. One of the shelter attendants loved animals very much. He adopted as many dogs as he could but Burgwin found him one day in tears, cradling a Samoyed pup he was supposed to kill (they are adorable little fluff balls who lick your face) and gently steered him into another job somewhere else.
A man came in and demanded to see what animals we had killed that day. Instead of preventing him, I escorted him. He looked at the knee-high pile (some kittens on top) with a stone face, took it in, turned and left. Never came back.
Another day it was a trucker, big tough guy, who had to put his little ride-along buddy to sleep because of suffering old age. He wept the whole time and one of us put our arms around him and held him for a while. Then there was the woman who called for us to come get the family cat because her husband would only have sex with the cat, not her. I didn't figure it out until I heard about Howard Stern's tiny penis contest and learned about micro-penises.
It was clear that humans are animals, packed with emotions that animals have and lots more besides. Sorting and guiding all that prevented murder and mayhem. An escaped camel from a cigarette ad that got tangled in a swing set at the elementary school, an escaped half-grown pet lion that was the pet of the son of the King of the Gypsies, a steady stream of giant constrictor snakes that never matched the occasional big snake impounded in some surprising place. Dogs, barking, barking, barking. Cats yowling as they gave birth for the third time in a year. An extended family from a Mediterranean country who killed a goat and roasted it over a pit fire in plain sight. A crazed escaped elephant.
I wangled a way to visit animal control in Los Angeles to learn from them. A handsome ex-marine explained that they averaged five loose lions a year, usually tame old beasts used in movies, but they feared most of all the occasional rogue ostrich that would tear your guts out with their big claw feet, really just contemporary velociraptors. One guy made himself an expert with a bolo (heavy balls on a short piece of rope) specifically to capture ostriches. In the old days, they explained, there were always ropers around in the off-season for rodeos, but the lost popularity of Westerns had ended the type.
The main insight was that humans are an interacting version of other animals and that everything was situational. This has remained true. It is foundational.
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