Between 1973 and 1978 I was an animal control officer in SE Portland between the Banfield freeway and Powell, but sometimes as far south as the Multnomah County line. Responding to complaints that came in mostly via telephone, I went knocking on doors to talk to owners, only rarely “catching dogs.” Dogs know what they do and why. Owners fail to think about it or do anything about it. If people are gone all day, they don’t know that their dogs bark constantly. They always claimed their dogs never bit anyone.
I never had a case where someone shot barking dogs, but I know some were tempted. The saddest ones were people with relatives dying at home who had to hear dogs howling all night. Those dog owners were the ones who knew never to open the door for anyone wearing a uniform. I left threatening notes. We'd had door-hangers made up.
I hesitate to tell much about actual confrontations, because they tend to drift and morph on the ‘net until they escape reality, but some were pretty funny. Portland Police called one afternoon to ask for help for an officer trying to serve a warrant but cornered by a dog on a front porch with no one at home. When I got there, it was an older guy pinned by a small noisy shepherd. He lamented, “I’m supposed to retire next week! If I survive dog bites !!” But he wasn’t bitten and when I advised the dog sternly to go lie down, it did. I didn’t have to use my catch pole. I tried to sympathize.
That officer had a personal radio on him, but I only had a truck radio so if I were away from it, I was on my own. One day the dispatcher advised that a call had come in about a rabid St. Bernard gone crazy and racing through a neighborhood foaming at the mouth. We were not armed. “Should I have PPD meet you?” I thought I should scout the problem first and it was the right thing to do. The dog out of Stephen King novels turned out to be a puppy with worms throwing up. It really was a St. Bernard, though.
St. Bernards are often bred to have dry mouths because everyone hates their slobbering, but that ignores temperament which they were originally genetically managed to make them benign rescue dogs. The same greed for saleable dogs perpetuates hereditary cripplings like hip joints that are too shallow and dislocate easily.
The complex forces at work in these cases are illustrated in an incident that was about a barking dog in a very nice neighborhood with big expensive houses. Expecting a housewife, I knocked and the door opened about six inches to a young woman biker. Operating on my liberal ethic of treating everyone with respect, I gave my little speech about being a good neighbor while realizing that there were a dozen other hulking forms moving around behind her. She was respectful, too, and I left.
As soon as I drove a couple of blocks away, I was pulled over by the cops with siren and lights. Now what? It turned out they are on stakeout, watching that house. They were angry because they thought that the bikers thought I was sent by the cops and so their cover was blown. They were angry with me that no one at PPD thought to alert us. They were a little freaked out, assuming that I was low-class and — worse — FEMALE. “Did you at least get their birth dates?” they demanded. That’s how you find villains in the computer files.
The real story finally came out when my boss, Burgwin, who had been a cop himself, talked to PPD. The barking complaint had come in from the house’s neighbor on the back of the block, a county judge who often was unsympathetic to our court cases. The reason the dogs were barking was because the bikes themselves were chained together in the backyard with a couple of doberman dogs chained to them because a rival gang often sabotaged their machines. One of the bikers had inherited the house from a deceased uncle. Presumably, when the uncle made his will, the man wasn’t a biker yet.
The saddest cases were things like the St. Bernard who was in the habit of riding on the hitch of a trucker’s big 18-wheeler. We rebuked him for this, so he tried to leave the dog chained to a pipe in the upstairs bedroom. The dog, in a effort to go along when he saw his owner fire up the truck, leapt out the open window. The chain was not long enough and he hung to death.
Or the two dobermans chained to pipes in the basement of the house in a bad neighborhood. The residents had left, leaving the dogs to starve to death. We couldn’t find the people. We'd had no complaints about the dogs until the house owner went to clean up to re-rent. Maybe they moved far away. Maybe they were also dead.
When I remember stories like this one from a few years ago, I always wonder how much is performance, how much is people in need (maybe in need of brains), and how much is stigmatized people who are clustered and defensive in a place slightly more tolerant than other places.
Being an animal control officer, even fifty years ago, was a good insight into Portland, not the city of malls and Chucky Cheese, but the demographic patterns of neighborhoods and the potential for uproar. I only started one small riot in Laurelhurst late one summer afternoon when I tried to sell dog licenses to a lot of half-dressed and half-drunk young people. The event was easy and quick. One of the early female PPD sergeants had to break it up, accompanied by a wrecker to take my truck to a service station because the rioters let all the air out of my tires, but they didn’t get the truck door open. The dogs inside barked their best and loudest to show they were protective.
My boss said I had balls. And I should learn how to avoid trouble. It was a good story for "Dog Catching in America," my book on Amazon or www.lulu.com.
My boss said I had balls. And I should learn how to avoid trouble. It was a good story for "Dog Catching in America," my book on Amazon or www.lulu.com.
Here's a more recent semi-related story with no dogs in it.
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