I won't be fooled again

A very long time ago, years ago, back when I was a rookie doing this job, I got dispatched to an unknown, frightening-looking animal on the reporting party’s back patio.  They were unsure whether it was alive or dead, and were unwilling to look out their rear window, let alone step on to the back porch to confirm any of this. In fact, the request was that an officer would simply remove it. Specifically, they did not want anyone to knock on their door or even call them, just go straight in the side gate and get this creature away from them, right now.  Once I had impounded the stuffed chew toy tossed into their back yard by the neighbor’s dog, I knocked on their door anyway, catching them in mid-meth-pipe-action to let them know their problems were over…

Also a long time ago, maybe only a few months or a year after the dog toy, when I was still wet behind the ears, of course, I was driving down the street in baby crow season and saw a fledgling tuft of black feathers in the middle of the street at a fairly busy intersection. I knew its family would be feeding it but I couldn’t fathom letting this little bird or any of its buddies get hit by a car. I flipped on my overheads, blocked traffic for a minute and impounded a crumbled up piece of black paper.

That was when I was still new and learning the lay of the land of course. I used these stories recently in fact while training our newest rookie. So when I was on my way past the beach today and saw a couple by the waterline with two off-leash dogs, I didn’t even think twice about parking my truck in the bus stop, switching on the overheads and grabbing my cite book. 

“This is the most polluted beach around,” I thought to myself as I climbed over the fence by the railroad tracks. “Who would let their dogs near this water in good conscience?”  I knew the city had recently paid tens of thousands of dollars to a falconer to use his trained birds of prey to haze away seagulls from the toxic creek outflow, while biologists tried to get a better read on the types of pathogens occurring in what locals have for years referred to as The Polio Pond. The gulls appeared to have relocated somewhere else, but this shore was still home to dozens of protected sea birds, whose populations could be severely threatened by unrestrained dogs harassing breeding pairs and crushing hidden, buried nests.

“I have some educating to do here,” I thought as I crossed the sand, waving my arms at the young couple who were looking at me with weird looks on their faces as they walked away from their dogs, which curiously hadn’t moved even a little bit from their post near the toxic creek outflow…

Fooled again.

Turns out the city replaced the falcons with a couple of plastic coyotes.

I’m not going to tell my rookie, I’m going to let him figure it out the hard way too.

5150

The nice thing about searching a hoarder’s house for a scared, hiding animal is that you don’t have to worry about knocking over stacks of boxes and baskets, kicking bags of trash around or moving piles of clothing from heap to heap. Hey, the place is already a wreck anyway!

This is what was going through my mind as my rookie and I did just this for twenty minutes, once we quit screwing around with a loose window screen and tried the front door and found it unlocked and made our entry.  We were looking for a terrified, injured miniature pinscher-mix, last seen by its owner dragging its rear end as if it had a broken leg two nights ago.  The dog had bit a neighbor at three a.m. when the neighbor tried to pick it up, after it came home from being missing since midnight.  The cops became involved when the neighbor then realized the dog’s owner was having another psychic break, but got there after the dog owner had already split, locking the dog in her house. 

This was not unusual, according to the neighbor, who told me the dog owner seemed to check herself into the psych ward every other month, for weeks at a time.  I was able to reach the dog owner on the phone at a local mental health clinic, and was pleased to find her with-it enough to give me some phone numbers of friends with keys to her place, and permission to impound and evaluate the dog’s injuries. 

“Listen to me now young man,” she told me, “my house is locked up tight as a drum, and you may have trouble finding my dog.”

“Why is that, ma’am?”

“Well, you see, I am a hoarder, but not a whore.”

(Shared chuckling between the two of us)

“Don’t you worry about a thing. I have found plenty of scared animals in cluttered homes. You just get better and give us a call at the animal shelter when you come home.”

“God bless you.”

Not sure God heard that last part… We took the three-room town house apart, balancing our way through an impressive, if highly disorganized hat collection, crates of bags filled with who knows what, nearly every square inch of floor covered by bags, cushions, pillows, luggage, random pieces of furniture covered in mountains of clothing, and quickly realized there was absolutely no food or water anywhere available to the dog.

We ultimately found her hiding under a bed which had moments before been hidden under a giant pile of clothes, and she came THIS CLOSE to chewing my rookie’s arm off but for his quick thinking with his catch pole.  I was able to cover the dog’s head with a towel and pick it up, and it seemed to calm down considerably in my hands as I placed it in my truck. Which is why I tried the old cover-the-dog’s-head-with-a-towel trick again in front of the vet’s office. And got the crap bit out of my right forearm, about three inches away from where I got bit last year by the escapee from the other vet’s office, which was on top of the bite I got the year prior by that damned dachshund from under the cop car.  Jesus H. Tap Dancing *&^%$!!!


You know what we found on this poor dog? Somehow in the few hours she had been lost that first night, she likely got jumped by a coyote, and had bite wounds on her torso exactly where I had been trying to hold her- duh.  The vet got her cleaned up, shot her with some antibiotics and pain meds and shipped her into X-ray.  My arm? The vet techs bandaged me up good as new with Halloween-special issue vet-wrap- I got a lot of compliments on it the rest of the day.

I got bit by a parrot

I was at the animal shelter pretty early this morning when a woman brought in a large box of donuts.  Since today was Friday the Thirteenth I took that to be a miraculous sign.  Except the box didn’t have any donuts in it, at all. It had a towel with bird shit on it, and a small green parrot.

We have, here where we are, lots of flocks of feral green Amazon parrots that fly around in groups, make a loud, awful racket, and look awesome as they hang out on phone wires, in trees, and fly around more. These are not song birds; these are cacophonous, invasive creatures that are slightly more pleasant than crows and proud, prolific excreters of their meals. You live here, you move your patio furniture out from under the ficus tree.  Once in a while one of them will fly into a window and get its bell rung, and somebody else will pick it up to save it and the bird will bite the living crap out of their hand, just to be mean.

“My girlfriend and I were walking along the sidewalk and this beautiful little bird fell out of the tree just like that, right in front of us.  He just sat there, and we didn’t want him to get eaten by a coyote or something like that.  He is so pretty, and he is really friendly, too!  Can you save him?”

I looked into the box of no donuts and saw a small green parrot sitting on the towel; he saw me and made a move like he was going to flap a wing, so I slammed the box lid shut and put on my crack-head-frisking gloves.  We had some staff there in the front office, and also some kind of TV reporter who was going to do some kind of story there at the shelter.  Fortunately she didn’t have her camera plugged in yet.

“How do you know he is friendly?”

“I picked him up and he walked around on my arm, and my friend petted him, and he seems like he is someone’s pet and he is just so sweet!”

I am not a bird guy.  A few years ago, when I probably should have still been in training, I had been kicked loose to do my job and had to break into a sweltering, 100-plus degree pick-up and rescue a macaw the size of a medium emu, and the feathers and (my) blood and shredded towel bits that resulted from that bout gave me a healthy respect for these sociopathic creatures. Some crush nuts with their beaks at over 200 thumb-severing pounds per square inch. 

But this parrot was small, and cute, and the finder reported it to be friendly.

I reached into the donut box and gently grasped the parrot, so I could do a quick, basic health evaluation; eyes, wings, legs, parasites, the usual. And discovered a small aluminum band around its left leg, with letters and numbers on it.  Okay, this parrot IS someone’s pet. Then it crunched down on the soft ball of my finger like wire cutters, like it meant it, squalking that malicious squalk they make when there are fifteen or thirty of them lurking in your back yard trees knowing you wanted to sleep in for another hour and a half.

I managed to keep the bird in my hand and with the help of a smirking kennel attendant and too many laughing witnesses stuff it into an empty bird cage, set it on a perch and latch the cage gate.  The parrot stalked to the far end of its perch and turned its back on me, refusing to make any eye contact with me, giving me its shoulder only, from every angle. 

You little prick, I thought, shaking out my mauled finger.  We get maybe a half dozen lost pet birds in a year and virtually all of them go unclaimed, and get adopted to new families.  I gloated at this one- you are mine to torment for months now, I thought to myself, looking at his back.  I am going to teach you bad words when nobody is looking, I thought again to myself, still looking at his back.

I named it Thug.

You know what?  Two hours later a nice older couple came in asking if anyone had found their sweet little mustache parakeet.

I am awesome

I am not exactly sure how this blog thing started, other than over the last few years I found a little stress relief by writing things down that happened to me at work, and some of my family surprised me by being entertained by these things, and, well, now some of the things I wrote down that didn’t get deleted now can get saved on the internet here.  A naturally quiet and humble person, I generally have only recorded instances which make me look awesome.  To be truthful, stuff happens to me far more regularly which reveals to the average bystander what an awkward and clumsy person I usually am.  For example, that time about three years ago when I got called out to a hit-by-car bobcat down by the DMV.  (This isn’t the point of this story, I am only using this as an intro to the thing that happened to me today which will once again clarify to you that I am not as awesome as I think I am.)

Bobcats occur with great frequency in my jurisdiction, but when they are found hit by a car, for some reason local law enforcement thinks it is a big enough deal that they should have a couple of squad cars roll up and secure the scene until someone like me can show up with a trash bag. I do this, and in the space of three seconds I am able to trip over a curb, step in dog shit, and go elbows-deep into bobcat guts with both arms.  The two deputies on scene see this, and remain quiet.  I say, “Awesome.  What else can possibly go wrong for me today.” And the older one of the two, bless his soul, says, “Buddy, in this line of work, never ask yourself that question again.” And I look over at the two guys, and neither of them are even chuckling.

I knew today was going to go a bit like that day when I pulled a message of the animal shelter machine when I got to work about a skunk with his leg caught in a plastic rat trap in some guy’s yard.  I get to the yard, and saw that the rat trap had been tied to a tree because the guy who set it told me he was tired of the rats not being killed right away and dragging off his traps.  We had some conversation about more humane ways to control his rat population, including maybe cleaning up the mountain of bird seed scattered about his outdoor canary cages, and then I traced the string through his bushes and through his fence into the neighbor’s yard where this poor skunk was still hung up and twisted around in the bushes. Sweet.  So I go into the neighbor’s yard with a blanket and a cat carrier and a trace of optimism that the skunk’s leg is not broken, that it isn’t completely compromised by dehydration, and see three things: one, the skunk is healthy, its leg is not broken.  Two, the skunk is completely surrounded by sharp, spiky brush.  Three- the skunk sees me.

There is no way around this one.  I can fool with my blanket all day long but it is not going to be an effective foil against this animal’s defense mechanism. I suck it up, reach into the shrub with the blanket in one hand to immobilize the skunk and catch maybe a mist of the spray on a small part of the blanket, and catch pretty much five full blasts on my arms, shirt, and pants while I unspring the trap and watch the little fellow trot away into some Birds of Paradise. It’s now 7:45 a.m. I am on till 16:30. I reek like what you think I reek like, and I am all out of Skunk Off in my supply section of my truck and that shit is worthless anyway.

So I drive a block down to the beach; a good sand & saltwater scrub will take care of my arms, at least.  I pass a group of fit, attractive women on the beach doing some yoga class as I make my way from the train tracks down to the sand and hear more than a few of them say “eww.” Then I trip over the berm of sand I didn’t see and fall onto my knees and arms.  I get up and manage my way another fifty feet to the shore break, standing on the wet sand waiting for some wash to come in so I can get my hands wet. It comes in. Up to my shins. I think about when the steel toes in my boots will rust out as I scrub my arms with wet sand, trudge past the snickering yoga girls, and get back into my truck.

I reek of skunk as I type this; some of it is emanating from my boots in my bedroom, a good portion of it I managed to aerosolize throughout the house by throwing my uniform into the washing machine; mostly it is still coming off my arms, even after the beach bath and a thirty minute shower.

Bird story

I was lying on the couch watching Pawn Stars, it was the one with the guy who brought in the document that was signed by Jefferson, and he wanted like $30,000 dollars for it and it turned out it was either a fake or an auto-pen signed by Jefferson’s secretary or some shit, and was worth maybe $60, and they couldn’t come together on it, and I got a text from a friend of mine who is a rock star.  There was a pelican caught up in fishing line floating around in front of the fuel dock, and his boat was not operational, could we use mine tomorrow and try to get it?

Pelicans are some of the most regal birds I know.  The state I live in, they were only recently removed from the endangered species list.  They are susceptible to a long list of threats, including toxic algae, overfishing, diseases, and by-catch in the form of fishing tackle.  If you have been to the shore, anywhere, you have perhaps seen a V-shaped formation of them flying low over the cresting waves as they relocate from one place to another.  You can almost hear a flight of B-52s rumbling overhead when they cruise past.  Pelicans are big, and when they hunt, they dive-bomb their prey from upwards of twenty feet in the air, looking and sounding like a window air conditioner falling out of an apartment building, and they come up out of the water with a fish nearly their same weight, gulp it down, and then float around with a well deserved look of satisfaction on their beaks.

So I met up with my friend this morning, and we went out and looked at all the pelicans hanging around the fuel dock and the bait barge.  All the pelicans we saw seemed fine, they were floating around waiting to eat bait thrown by the fishing poles by the guys also floating around on their boats who were too lazy to actually go out into the ocean beyond pelican flying range.  Except for the one pelican, who was hunkered down behind some kind of netting-screen thing on the bait barge, designed to protect the bait from the pelicans. I maneuver (I spell-checked it) my boat to the edge of the bait barge, the musician jumps on to it and grabs the downed pelican, gets back onto the boat and we float back off into the bay.

If you know anything at all about boats, including old canoes, models that float in swimming pools, or for example cruise ships, stuff breaks when you need it.  My friend is on the deck examining the pelican, to figure out our next move.

“Dude, you good there, should we just float around or do you want me to tie up somewhere?”

“No, we’re good floating.” 

I let us float away from the barge some more and my friend says, “you know what, I need a hand here.”

I look around for the nearest dock and it is the Harbor Patrol dock where the sheriffs, Homeland Security, State Fish and Wildlife and a few others live.  I key my marine radio, which is probably, after life jackets and knowledge of how to swim, the most important piece of equipment on a boat where we are.

“Harbor Patrol, this is vessel xxxx, do you copy?”

Nothing.

“Harbor Patrol, this is vessel xxxx, I will be side-tying to your dock in a few minutes to conduct a wildlife rescue operation, do you copy?”

Nothing, again.

These guys have some pretty sweet assets in their docking area, including a couple of boats that look like mine but are three times longer, have three more engines on the back, and also big machine guns mounted on the bows.  As I bounce my boat off their dock and tie on I am fully prepared for incoming projectile grenades or at least a blast of that microwave heater thing I saw on Discovery Channel last year.

Nothing.

So I help my musician friend restrain the pelican and we spend maybe ten minutes or more cutting free a hellaciously huge fishing lure the size of a cheap cigar with three or four nasty treble hooks embedded in this poor bird’s leg and abdomen.  I keep expecting a helicopter to rappel down a bunch of operators or at least a SEAL team to pop up out of the water and offer to help, but clearly whatever trespass we were committing was not on their radar.

The rock star disentangled the pelican, we relocated back to the launch ramp where he had parked his truck, and he administered some fluids to this poor, lethargic, starved and dehydrated bird. And its attitude picked up, considerably.  My friend put the pelican in a kennel and into his truck and transported it to our local wildlife rehabilitation facility, and I motored back to my dock, wondering to myself what I would have to spend to fix my marine radio.  And my hydraulic steering went out, and it took me twenty minutes to get my boat the last five feet into my slip without carving into my neighbors’ boats with my propeller, and a squadron of pelicans did a low fly-by and one of them shit a glop of brown schmoo the size of an omelet onto my engine.

possession of an instrument of crime

Real quick here, because my hope is this person is going to get out of jail soon and come back home before they lose their animals… and maybe face some more charges…

I get dispatched to call from a pet sitter who has been hired to feed a person's animals while they are traveling.  His concern is, the animal owner was supposed to be home last week, and isn't, and isn't answering their cell phone. And the sitter has already paid for more dog food which has now run out, and he isn't sure how much longer the cat food, rabbit food, parrot food and fish food will hold out. Also, due to the above, the animal owner was reported "missing" to our local sheriff's department, and the landlord has also been unable to contact them and apparently the rent is overdue and there is now a 3-day notice to vacate tacked to the apartment's front door.

So I meet the pet sitter, go inside, and observe food, shelter, water for everybody, (2 dogs, 4 cats, a rabbit, a giant cockatoo like Berretta had, only this one talks some kind of gibberish like it has only been exposed to science fiction TV, which makes sense since there is a TV pointed at its cage with some weird science fiction show on permanent reruns) and some fish in a tank.  I see that one of the dogs has some major eye problems and is presenting with pain, and see the empty bottles of eye drops associated with glaucoma treatment, and also that the rabbit looks like it has been living in a wire cage forever and has some type of mange, ocular discharge and a lot of wounds related to the shitty cage conditions it lives in. 

I call sheriff's and they tell me I have to call homicide division, since they deal with missing persons.  

"WTF?  I am supposed to get ducks out of storm drains, and you want me to talk to homicide? "

"Their phone number is xxxxxxxx."

So I call homicide division.

"What can you tell me?"

"Nothing.  This report is only  a week old, we haven't done anything on it yet."

"I have to kill this person's dogs, cats, rabbit, bunny and fish, unless you can find them for me, or next of kin." (Exaggeration works.)

"I'll call you back."

My partner and I take the dog with the glaucoma and the rabbit with "ignored forever in cage" syndrome, and begin making plans to figure out what to do with the other dog and the bird and the cats and the fish.

Then I get a call back from homicide.

"Your person is alive."

"Awesome, that is good news."

"They are in custody (in a city out of state.)"

"How can I get in touch with them?"

"I can't tell you."

"Thanks."

I call the other city, and after talking to maybe 5 different folks who work for this city I get a hold of the right person.

"Do you have so and so?"

"Yes."

"Can I speak with them?"

"No."

"Will they be free to speak with me soon?"

"I doubt it."

"I will have to kill their animals if I can't find out when they will be back to their home (in my state.)"

"Hang on."

(No hold music, for all I know I have been hung up on.)

"They are getting arraigned in 2 days."

"Do they have a lawyer?"

"I don't know."

"How do I find out?"

"You can write them a letter." (I am given an address to the jail with a case number.)

Now I start to think about asking prying questions, which is an investigative technique I have learned from watching CSI-Miami and also NYPD Blue.

"What is their bond?"

"$50,000."

"What are they being charged with?"

"Prostitution."

"$50,000 for hooking?"

"And possession of an instrument of crime."

"What the fuck is that?"

"I don't fucking know."

"Okay, thanks for your help."

So as it stands now I will be feeding a dog, 4 cats, a bird and some fish until I can figure out how to get in touch with this person.  The agency I work for is cool in that if there is a way we can get the animals back to the owner, and enforce proper care, we will. I just hope the instrument of crime isn't a deal breaker.

a happy ending

First off, it turns out there is a cop killer on the loose, and therefore every local animal control agency locked their ACOs [Animal Control Officers] indoors since ACOs are not armed, and no one was out today to take care of animal problems.  Except my agency.  We didn’t get the memo.  So when I got to work this morning and got a call about a huge brown dog trapped in a canyon, that had been there for at least 3 days, I went to the canyon.  And I saw a huge brown Akita roaming around down in the canyon.  I called to it, and he looked at me and ran away, into the underbrush.

So I hike into the canyon and track it for an hour, seeing it several times, getting close several times, and seeing it ignore my offered treats and disappearing into the brush, along the length of a heavily overgrown riparian canyon, complete with several abandoned homeless encampments and lots of growth where this dog was hiding from me. 

At one point I cornered it in an area next to a fence and an empty building, but what was on my mind was, last week another lost Akita tried to kill me in its own front yard, and now, I am deep into an empty canyon in an area where no one would hear me scream, if I was the kind of person to scream, while being eaten by an Akita.  So over the phone I check our lost dog list; yup, a family had reported a huge brown Akita missing 5 days ago, miles away from where I was but based on description, it’s their dog. 

The dog has been in this canyon for days; it isn’t going anywhere else.  I call the family.  They drive down, I meet them in a parking lot, and Dad hikes and scrambles through the canyon with me.  And we see the dog, and he sees us, and he continues to run away and hide. Dad tells me, yeah, “xxxxx” is 13, senile, mostly deaf and somewhat blind.  Combine that with usual dog behavior when they are lost in the wild and often go a little feral due to fear, I’m not surprised the dog is hiding from us. 

I leave Dad there to try to catch him himself and do some other stuff, but he can’t find the dog anymore and goes back to work.  Then I meet up with my partner, who has magic and scared-dog wrangling skills that simply can’t be taught.  We go to a lookout point and see the dog down in the canyon.  She calls to him, and he looks up at us and runs away and hides.  We hike into the canyon (this is my 4th time so I know where the hidden drainage holes and the rest of the ankle breakers are) and track the dog and corner him next to a fence and an empty building. 

My partner sweet talks him into a leash, hikes out one way, I hike out the other way to the truck and the dog jumps into the front seat of my truck and drinks a couple of bowls of water and scarfs a handful of beef jerky treats (they are delicious.)  

I call the dog’s Mom, meet her at her house and she gets the dog back.  The neighbors are all out in the street and ecstatic, they have all been searching for this dog for days, the family has 4 small kids who have been in turmoil since their dog went missing, one of them is special needs with an extraordinary bond with this dog, everyone is crying.  I was crying (just a little, and no one else noticed, so it’s cool) as I wrote Mom a fixit ticket to license the dog.  The dog was pretty stoked to be back with his children.