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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.