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.