I smiled when I saw the iguana poop on my i-phone.

Got a call about a stray animal, it was on some guy’s property, sitting in a planter, looked fearsome enough that the caller didn’t want to put it on a leash or anything, just was standing way back, waiting for the pro… me… Hahaha!  I checked our system on the laptop in my truck, and texted my partner who was on vacation on the other side of the continent. Seems like a very similar animal has been impounded as a stray, trespassing, threatening other residents in the area, twice in the last six months.

I rolled up to the apartment in question, the reporting party led me inside, and I saw exactly what he was concerned about. To date, no incidents had been reported about this monster injuring anyone during any of his forays, but it is common for neighbors to choose to not report vicious animals in an effort to keep peace in the neighborhood. Personally, I had never in my life handled one like this. I have seen on TV professionals becoming overconfident in a situation such as the one I was facing, and end up on the internet as the guy who got wrecked and humiliated by an animal everyone said “had always been so friendly!”

I slipped on my crack-head frisking gloves and fessed up- and gently lifted a three-foot iguana out of the ivy plant, carried him out of the apartment and put him in a kennel in my truck. I named him “Paul.”

Where I work, we are having a dry spell, and it has been hot for a while. My partner has been on vacation, so I have been covering the field a little bit more than usual, and overseeing our rookies as they spend a little bit more time in it. Wednesday I made a rookie handle calls while I helped our local Large Whale Entanglement Team free a 25 foot juvenile gray whale from a nasty mess of gillnet that got caught up in the whale’s mouth. While we cut free a hundred feet of commercial fishing industry trash from this majestic mammal, when we set it free its condition appeared highly compromised. If you care, visit whatever websites advocate more controls over gillnet fishing.

My plan was to bring “Paul” the iguana to our local reptile pro to evaluate his condition and get him back to his owner; two other calls got in the way, and my rookie wasn’t due to be on duty for a couple of hours…

My state’s Penal Code xxx.x allows an animal control officer to remove an animal from an unoccupied vehicle when conditions may present a threat to the animal. Dogs do not sweat. They control their body temperature by panting. If they intake air that is as hot as they are, they will die from heat exhaustion quickly. The H2 is parked in a lot frequented by surfers who spend all day on the water, the plate runs to a guy who has a history of leaving his dog in his car to bake. I have removed this dog from this car before; my fellow officers have also interacted with the dog owner.  Recently, too.  Direct sunlight, no ventilation, exterior temperature of 80F, interior temperature of 100F…  the dog is panting like mad and freaking out.  I’m taking the dog. And I know I am going to have an unpleasant conversation with the d-bag when he reclaims it at my shelter.

But first, I have a rare call regarding an endangered species: a desert tortoise. In my state, one can receive a permit to keep as a pet a tortoise that is rare enough that it has been classified as endangered. This is because their habitat has been encroached upon so much during the last century, and so many of these animals have been removed unlawfully from the wild, that the state is simply trying to keep the population viable before we crush the remainder with our dirt bikes and ATV’s and strip malls. One would assume that as a keeper of a fifty-year old tortoise, which has been passed down as a pet for several generations, that the keeper would take some precautions to ensure the safety of this noble animal.  Which is probably why the grown man on the other end of my phone burst into sobbing tears when I informed him that I had his family’s legacy in my truck, an unfortunate victim of a neighbor’s SUV.

Back up at the shelter, my conversation with the ass-clown in the hummer didn’t go well at all, he got his dog back, thankfully free of heat injury, and he and I both know we will see each other again in the field. (I will see him first.) The tortoise owner will most likely be investing in a yard gate that closes. Paul? Turns out his family has TWO iguanas, this is Paul’s first impound, it is the other iguana which has been impounded twice, the family is now hopefully inspired to improve their enclosures to prevent future straying, and scaring of their neighbors. Also? Paul is apparently a girl named “Lizzy.”

I love skunks

I don’t mean to anthropomorphize here (spell check doesn’t know it, I know it but no way I am going to try to say it out loud) but skunks are morons.

Skunks rule: they score a solid 10/10 on the cuteness scale, they eat bugs that would otherwise eat your budding flower and fruit seedlings, they look totally awesome and they have a self preservation defense mechanism which you and I as humans discreetly crave.  Come on, admit it, we have a preternatural instinct to shit on that which we don’t like- for crying out loud it was beautifully articulated in Monty Python and the Holy Grail, I am just saying I love skunks.

But man they must be dumber than rocks, for all the trouble they manage to get into that even your average poorly-bred three-year old human can avoid.  I read on the internet that there is a movement urging Yoplait® to change the design of their yogurt cups since so many skunks- around the world! - manage to get their heads stuck inside them while they are grazing our trash cans and dumpsters. I’ve freed a handful of them from yogurt cups over the years and I simply assume they trot away looking for their next slurp of blueberry & vanilla backwash.

These little black and white idiots apparently also are sports fans.  Where I work, our skunks have miles and miles of wildland space to forage, and yet, in only the last year I have found them completely entangled in field-goal netting at the local high school football field, a street hockey net over at the state park and this morning bound up in some kind of baseball backstop net inside this one lady’s garage.

I rolled up to the garage this morning and the lady was waiting for me.  I think I said something like this was my second skunk in netting in 2 weeks.

“Did the net survive?”

I thought she meant the skunk, and as I rifled through my tool box for wire cutters, paramedic shears, nutro-cal and a tongue depressor I explained how of course I was able to transport it to a local wildlife rehabilitation center to make sure it was rehydrated, its laceration injuries were treated and it was released back to the wild shortly thereafter.

“No.  I asked, did the netting survive? We just bought this baseball backstop and it cost $XX.00!”

“The netting never survives. Ever.”  (Solid eye-contact too- she got the point.)

I grabbed a blankie from one of my truck’s kennels and headed into the garage.

Where I work, skunks are like the second highest creature on the county health department’s rabies list.  Right under bats.  When I first stumbled my way into this job, I dealt with skunks at more than just arm’s length- I used the longest catch pole in the tool section, and destroyed more pairs of bullet-proof welder’s gloves (we call them raptor gloves, sounds cooler) than our budget allowed for.  Over time, I realized something.

Skunks- especially the babies, which most commonly reveal themselves to be retards-  are pretty much docile creatures. They deploy their God-given self-defense juice when they need to, and often.  But when they get into trouble, and by the time someone like me finds them, they are simply gassed out. Wrong phrase: they still spray.  But their energy level is diminished, they are low on blood sugar & water, and for whatever reason, they can’t bite through my cool crack-head frisking gloves I saw on COPS last year and ordered on-line during the very next commercial break.

I cut the shit out of the lady’s baseball netting...  and wrapped my putrid-smelling project into a sweet zebra-striped blankie, swabbed some nutro-cal onto its cute little tongue and shoved it into a bush in her back yard.

My boss kicked me out of the animal shelter when I got back to do some paperwork, apparently I got more of the little guy’s fragrance on my uniform than I thought and was making the rest of the staff sick.  Also, I had lunch with my partner later and she made me get us a table outside.  Whatever, The Bride’s not home yet and The Dog seems to like me more than usual.  (The gloves are in the trash can in the side yard.)

Foxy

I thought this one was going to be redundant but the Bride pointed out that everything I ever say or talk about is redundant, so if this one seems like you heard it before, welcome to my morning…

The call from the cops at 7 a.m. was, there is a pit bull tied to a fence between the liquor store and the trailer park where all the bad things happen, and it has been tied there all night long. So I go there, and I see a large red nose pit lying on the ground with a black rope wrapped around her neck and around the chain link fence, but in such a way that the rope around her neck looks loose enough like she could pull out of it if she wanted. One guy walked past her and she looked at him, another guy rode past her on a crappy old bike and she looked at him too, and just lay there. Why was I surprised then, when I got out of my truck and she immediately stood up and barked at me in a mean fashion?

In the back of my mind I knew I was looking for one of two red nose pits- one guy from the next town had called me last week looking to re-home one, I told him our little pro-humane shelter was full-up on pits, he should google rescues, offer it up on craig’s list or call the county shelter, and I noted it in case it turned up as a dump. (I could go on for gigabites about jerk-offs who have a couple of pit bulls for a couple of years, claiming they are such soul mates with their dogs, such great owners and trainers and so responsible, and then mom in Texas has a hangnail so they have to move back to take care of mom’s hangnail and have no place for their dogs to go so it is now MY problem.)

This wasn’t that red nose.  This was Foxy, the other red nose.  (I figured it out from the microchip, which was registered to Darlene, a well known meth dealer in town, who had given the dog several years ago to Marla, a girl I knew who lives under some cardboard in the bushes by the dumpsters near where they built the new restaurant.) 

The first time I met Foxy, she was in the back of a police car with her person, Marla, who was also sitting in the back of the police car, handcuffed, and waiting to be transported to the jail.  This was at the far end of the abandoned, razed trailer park by the sewer plant, that was all overgrown and inhabited with maybe all of the city’s homeless population camping along the fringes. Marla had been holding meth and said something about her boyfriend stabbing someone and wanting to stab her, I didn't really catch it all as I leashed the red pit and pulled her out of the car.  I told Marla that I would take care of Foxy while she took care of her short term business, and Marla told Foxy to trust me, so she did, and so that’s how we met.

This time, before I figured out the part you just read about who the dog was, I needed to get the dog from the fence into my truck, so I grabbed some beef jerky treats (again, they are delicious) and ambled sideways toward her while looking somewhere else and pretending to have a conversation with an invisible person. The dog continued to bark at me in a mean fashion, but it was fear barking, so I turned my back on her and sat down on the ground, on some old cat shit and broken glass.  And the dog turned her back on me and sat down too. I petted her rump and she freaked out and barked meanly at me from a foot away. I made a mental note that I should be eulogized as an idiot. Then the dog licked my ear and my face and crawled into my lap. I knew this dog! And, she knew me – Foxy!

The liquor store guy said she had been there all night, so did the manager of the trailer park, so Foxy got to ride shotgun. Turns out Marla had been arrested the previous night, in the next town over. Her charges include a warrant for failure to appear for a prior theft charge, she was arrested for theft and possession of illegal narcotics for sale. She will be arraigned tomorrow and will probably be released before noon. 

Here is the part that would surprise me five years ago but now makes sense: I will return Foxy to Marla when she tries to reclaim her, and waive all the fees.  This is because Foxy would not survive in a shelter, her protective aggression makes her unadoptable, there are no pit bull rescues in real life, there are no rescues in real life for homeless, addicted mentally ill women, and on the streets Marla might not survive without Foxy to protect her. I am supposed to prioritize my calls in favor of public safety. I will be keeping my eye out in that part of town for Marla and Foxy.

Little Things

2 of the 7 people who have read this blog have emailed me complaining about no new updates since the last one.  This is because nothing has happened worth talking about. Except maybe a few little things, which when I added them up made it clear to me why I had been feeling a little low lately. I decided I would write down these things and see if it helps.

I run into mental illness so often in my line of work now that I wonder how many times I ran into it in my past life and didn’t see it for what it is. I know now I have had friends and family who fit into this category, and that I probably do, and I expect almost everyone else I know also has it as part of their life too.  So there.

Thor the totally awesome pitbull was back in the shelter this week. I have run across him regularly during some of my beach patrols these last three or four months, he has been living with Jesus Joe, a local homeless guy living in a Ford Ranger with a mismatched plastic camper shell, taking great care of this incredible beast who loves everyone he meets.  Thor used to live with Phil, who used to live under the bridge between the beach and the town; I last saw Phil and Thor together last Fall when the Sheriffs asked me to help them while they were clearing out a homeless encampment by the railroad tracks, and they thought Phil was dead inside his tent and were afraid Thor wouldn’t let them do their job. (Phil had owned Thor for years before I ever started my job, there is another post on this blog about that.) Phil was ok though, just sleeping it off, and Thor couldn’t have been happier to see me. So earlier this year when I saw Thor tied to the bumper of a truck in a parking lot, I was surprised that Phil wasn’t there but Jesus Joe was.

Jesus Joe told me Phil had died in a hospice late last year, and that Thor was by his side to the end. And Jesus Joe took it upon himself to care for Thor, which he has been doing a bang up job of as far as I can tell, and it’s my job to tell. Jesus Joe told me he had been trying to help Phil quit drinking but it wasn’t taking.  He himself had been sober for a decade and had no reason to go back to the bottle, he was proud of his nickname earned by trying to guide other folks in his circle toward a better way of living. So when I checked out the previous night’s activities and saw Thor had been impounded by my rookie at 1 a.m. earlier this week and Jesus Joe had been arrested for a DUI, I was bummed. Thor was released to some other dude who is a friend of Jesus Joe the next morning, and Jesus Joe was released that day too.  I will look for him this week and see if I can give Thor a bag of dog food and some more treats.

Speaking of my rookie, on his first week set free on his own 2 months ago he ran across a homeless kid he knew to be on parole, with his dog off leash on one of our hiking trails while carrying a rifle. He sat the kid down, took his rifle and called the cops. The cops arrested the guy, impounded his house (a Ford Ranger with a mismatched home-made plywood camper shell, packed with bottles of urine) and we impounded the dog, Stuffy. The kid is in his early 20s, with a long history of burglary, petty theft, etc. and is a poorly medicated schizophrenic.  His family refuses to have anything to do with the him, or even Stuffy, which is a Jack Russel terrier-mix the kid smuggled in from Mexico and is, startlingly, totally friendly to everyone.  The kid went for a parole violation, possession of a firearm, 60 days minimum. Typically, we will keep an owned dog for 10 days before we offer it up for adoption. Since the kid is somewhat of a local, and since we knew he would eventually be back on our streets, for whatever misguided reason our shelter decided to return the dog to him this Tuesday, for nominal fees. Anyway, the kid had some kind of meltdown Wednesday, and was arrested at Walmart for trying to steal something, and Stuffy is, again, back with us. This time I am hoping he will be adopted out to a family with a house, not a Ford Ranger, who can take care of him.

Both Jesus Joe’s and The Kid’s Ford Rangers were surprisingly clean, albeit small places for a person to live in with a dog. When I went into Mable’s house last month I kicked myself for not taking the advice of the sheriff's deputies who accompanied me, and strap on a respirator. The build-up of rotting garbage, feces and urine in the unventilated, $1 million home made breathing nearly impossible. The Meals on Wheels guy had called it in this time when Mable refused to answer her door for the third day in a row, and the cops were surprised and pleased to find she was not DOA in a bathroom but had in fact checked herself into a hospital three days ago. She had made no provisions for her 2 miniature Yorkies, who were left for three days with absolutely no food or water in a beautiful trophy home swarming with insects and packed waist-deep with trash. 

Mable is only 76, yet her state of dementia is severe.  My agency has dealt with her before, as have social services, adult protective services, code enforcement, the county hoarding task force, her family and her neighbors.  Previously, we leveraged her to have her house cleaned up before we would return the dogs. This time, I decided I would let a judge decide if Mable should get her dogs back. She forgot to attend the hearing, and the dogs officially became the property of my agency a month ago.  Mable still refuses to allow anyone into her home to check on its condition, and until it falls down or catches on fire there is little any public agency can do.  She continues to drive to the shelter (on a revoked driver’s license, in a new BMW SUV) to ask when she can get her dogs back; she still insists she is fine in her house and rejects every attempt to ease her into an assisted living facility.  The dogs were recently adopted out together to a family with kids who love the dogs as much as the dogs love them.  Mable is still breaking the hearts of her family members, her social workers, emergency service workers and me.

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.