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.

Penelope

Today I spent a couple hours trying to track down a homeless guy with a dog I had impounded a couple of weeks ago, I had just learned that his girlfriend threw herself in front of a car last week and killed herself.  I gave him a 50-pound bag of dog food to keep him thinking about giving me the dog to find a new home for it, since a greasy tarp next to the rail-road tracks isn’t the best place to live.  For him or the dog.

I was thinking about other dogs related to homeless people I know, and this story came to mind.  I forget if I told you about Penelope.  I was minding my own business watching TV at like 8 p.m. two years ago, and since I was on-call I had to keep my work phone on and it rang, and it was the Sheriffs, and I had to drive down to the parking lot by the big box store, across the street from the trailer park where all the bad stuff happens.

This guy was watching a stray dog that had been wandering around in the road near the freeway on-ramp, and he didn’t want it to get hit.  So I get there 30 minutes later and he still has her hanging near him, no leash, no collar, just chilling.  She is a pit bull, no surprise.  Very light brown, brindle, and dirty, a little smelly, muscular, and scared.  Her teats were well engorged; she had recently whelped a litter and was probably wondering where her pups were.  She let me put a leash on her and run my hands over her looking for any injuries, but she was shy.  There was no way I was going to lift her into a kennel in my truck, that is the moment most animal control officers get bit, so I let her jump into the passenger seat and ride shotgun. She was panting a lot, avoiding eye contact with me, but watching my hands.  This girl got dumped, no question.  But clearly she liked being in the passenger seat of a car.

So I sat there with her in the front seat of my truck as I wrote stuff on my clipboard and tried to get her interested in beef jerky. She let me pet her and licked my hands but she was definitely shy, scared, and sketchy.  And I noticed across the street next to the trailer park there was a black dog running loose, and it disappeared behind the Donut World shack.  So I drove across the street and into the lot and behind Donut World, where there were a bunch of homeless guys drinking and hanging out.  One of them quickly grabbed up the black dog I had seen, leashed it and called out an apology.  I pulled up next to him and said no worries, I told him I was wondering if maybe his dog and the dog in my passenger seat belonged together.  Then some other transient gets interested and comes up to my window, and looks at my impound and says, “I know that dog, she belongs to my friend. Give me that dog, and I will give it back to my friend.”

Now a lot of sketchy people are gathering around my truck.  Mind you, I am well trained for this; I am issued handcuffs.  One pair.  Not seven pairs, and I think there are seven transients interested in my truck, and I’m barely qualified to operate these handcuffs in the bedroom, let alone in the field against seven crack heads.  I explain to the guy, no, it doesn’t work that way.  Tell me who your friend is and I will give the dog to him.  He says, no, man, I will prove it to you, the dog loves me.  And he starts walking around the front of my truck to go to the passenger window where the dog is, while another knucklehead begins jerking on the door handle to my truck. 

My television-training instinct kicks in at this point, and I push the button to start rolling up the passenger window.  The guy gets to the passenger window, tries to put his head inside the truck, and this dog I just picked up, who is still a little undecided about me, but must know that I am good, since I am giving her shelter and beef jerky, comes completely unglued and tries to eat the homeless guy who is coming through the half-rolled up window.  The other idiots on my side of the truck back way off, saying words that rhyme with “holy fucking shit, did you see how that fucker almost took so-and-so’s face off?! and the clown who thought the dog was his friend’s dog says something like “oh, must be a different dog,” and I drove away with my new best friend, “Penelope.”

Anyway, that was two years ago.  Penelope was great with me, for a while.  But you put a dog in a kennel, and keep her there for a year, or a year and a half, or two, with minimal socializing, and things change. Penelope was a red-lock dog from the get-go.  Only experienced volunteers and staff could handle her. She required a lot of vet visits too, developing a bad case of demodex, a skin parasite that is hard to kill and even harder to control in a kennel environment.  Penelope found herself in a chainlink world exactly the same size as a small prison cell, with an itchy skin condition that needed hands-on treatment, and only a few people in her world she trusted who could help her with her medication. Penelope didn’t like or trust all of our officers, nor all of our volunteers.  She was very fearful. For months her appointments were scheduled on days that I worked and could take her.  Eventually, Penelope was even fearful of me at her kennel gate, and soon she no longer would warm up to my efforts to coax her out of her enclosure. One day she showed me a level of fear aggression that I realized I could not overcome, and I passed her on to the few who could work with her.

Over time I admit I didn’t think about Penelope as much.  We had a lot of long-term stays at our shelter, and I was happy I could help socialize those who trusted me.  Some were dogs I had brought in, some were brought in by other officers, some came in over the counter, and all of them needed as much attention and affection as they could get and we could give.  Many were adopted out to new families, some were transferred to second chance rescue groups.  I don’t remember them all, as new ones came in every week.  I recall at some point Penelope was on a list with a few other kennel-aggressive pits to be shipped to a forever-rescue operation out-of-state, where she would have a large dog house and dog run to live her life out in, forever to be labeled an “unadoptable dog.”

And then a few months ago I pulled my truck into the sally port behind the shelter and saw some guy I didn’t recognize inside one of our staff-only dog runs throwing a ball with a light brindle pit.  A big, scary guy, and a big scary pit. Penelope.  Next weekend, he was there again.  And then, it seemed like every other day, this guy was inside the dog run, playing, cuddling, napping, reading, nuzzling, and just hanging out with Penelope. 

I asked him and he told me.  He wanted to be there, at the animal shelter, with Penelope.  He didn’t want to be anywhere else.  He had been deployed to the Middle East as a Marine, he was still living on base, where they didn’t allow mastiff breeds as pets.  He had something like 8 or 6 or 4 weeks left until they would discharge him, and the minute he got his papers, he was going to bring Penelope back to his family home, far away from our state, far away from here, far away from where he had been.  And as I talked to this Marine through the chain-link, Penelope wagged her tail and licked my hand through the fence, barked once at me, and nuzzled the guy like, quit talking, and throw the ball some more for me!  And he turned away from me and went back to playing with his girl. 

Three weeks ago, after living in a cage for two years, Penelope jumped into a sweet orange Challenger and helped her new dad escape his cage to start their new life.  Sometimes I think about looking up the guy’s number to check in on him and Penelope.  But frankly, I don’t think either of them need to look back.

Penelope

one of those days

I had a weird, but good, but still weird day today.

Part of my job in the mornings when I don’t have a rookie scheduled, is Vets Runs, Mail & Money.  This means transporting shelter dogs back and forth to vet appointments for spay/neuters, check ups, whatever, and bringing outgoing mail and yesterday’s shelter receipts down to city hall to the finance clerks.  Today I had this duty.  I dropped a kitty off at one vet for her appointment and drove over to another vet to pick up a dog.  The vet is in a mall that has a grocery store.  Grocery stores sell orange juice.  I haven’t drunk orange juice in a couple of years.  I decided I needed some orange juice, so I ran into the store and got some, and then headed into the vet’s and picked up the dog I was supposed to pick up.  The OJ run cost me about 2 extra minutes. 

On my way out of the mall parking lot, just before I pulled out and into traffic, in my right rearview mirror, I saw a dog running through the parking lot behind me dragging a leash.  I looked out my window and saw one of the vet staff running after the dog.  I watched as the dog and the vet staff guy ran all the way across the huge parking lot to the other end of the block and into traffic at the intersection of two 4-lane roads. 

Fuck. 

I flipped on the overheads, crossed through the parking lot, swerved around the vet staff guy who was running through traffic and yelling a lot, bounced over a curb and sidewalk into already stopped on-coming traffic, u-turned into the intersection, drove over the median curb and grass strip, and followed this little dog for a half mile into the next town (out of my jurisdiction), into a neighborhood, and into a cul-de-sac. 

By this time the dog was tired, so I just parked my truck, crossed the lawn where it was hiding in the bushes and picked up the leash.  I had left my truck in the middle of the street with the door open, and the dog indicated it wanted to jump inside the cab.  I said no, you get to ride in the kennels like everybody else. (I am an idiot.)  I petted the dog, the dog seemed to like me, so I picked the dog up to put it inside the kennel I had opened. 

She bit the living fuck out of my right hand, in the exact same spot that Frank, the psycho vicious Dachshund had bit my right hand when I pulled him out from under a police car near this same freaking intersection two years ago. Okay, so she got to ride in the front seat on the way back to the vet where she escaped from.  Everyone was happy the vet got their customer’s dog back, the vet let me use their first aid kit and their betadyne, and I finished all the other shit I had to do.

Then I had to go to the doctor.  I was going to just go to the ER but my boss said no, ER’s too expensive, I had to go to the same quack that squeezed my nuts when I took my physical to get my job.

So I drove over there, and I got a weird feeling.  I can’t explain it, it was just one of those feelings like I was very aware of what I was doing, where I was, what was going on around me.  I go into the doctor’s office and the front office girls said they didn’t have a doctor in today.  I call my boss and she says now I have to drive to another doctor’s office 15 miles away.  So I drive up there.  I am in the parking lot of the new doctor’s office, and I see a lady fall out of her car onto her wheelchair, which collapses with her on it and her car keeps rolling.  So I get out of mine, stop hers before she gets hurt and help some other people put her back into her wheelchair.  Then I go inside the doctor’s office and there in the waiting room is Cassie, a girl I used to work with during my old career and haven’t seen since for a decade and I got to meet her 2 year old son.

So the point is, if you don’t have 2 minutes to drink some orange juice, don’t fuck around with a stray dog.

bad naked revisited

Just last week I got called back to that same house twice in 2 days- the one where the girl had just gotten out of jail and I surprised her at her house when I went there to ask her to come to the shelter to reclaim her dog.  The first day her tweaker neighbor “M” was visiting her and I had to cite her for her dog being loose in the neighborhood attacking other people’s dogs.  (“M’s” dog is a Belgian Shepherd that I broke out of cars twice last year when it was owned by a different tweaker, “T.”) I hadn’t expected to run into “S," I was only tracking down “M” and didn’t realize I was at “S’s” house until it was too late to call the cops for a follow. (This is the nekkid girl with the shotgun history.) She was very pleasant though.

So I got to catch up with “S” while “M” finished up a screaming fight on her cell phone with someone about a credit card issue.  “S” definitely remembered answering the door nekkid, she told me she usually gets nekkid and plays her drums when she knows the cops are coming over to get her. 

Anyway, the VERY NEXT DAY “S’s” other neighbor noticed that "S's" dog (a small Jack Russell Terrier) had been tied up on her rear, elevated deck all night long and was tangled around a chair and some huge chunk of wood and couldn’t move, and now it was 90 degrees out and the dog had no water or shelter and was tired out from barking all night long.  This time the cops made me wait for them.  I knocked on all available doors and windows (there was new stucco around the metal security door but nobody had painted it yet) and got no answer.  This was not unusual for her, according to the cops.  She was either passed out in one of her rooms or simply didn’t want to talk to the cops.  

It was hot enough that the dog would be injured or killed if left tied in the sun with no water for more than a couple of hours, so I borrowed the neighbor’s 20’ extension ladder, and climbed up on to the deck from the side yard while all the cops pointed their guns at all the doors and windows in case “S” suddenly materialized with her shotgun.  I used the window- and door-checking techniques I learned from watching NYPD Blue and also COPS and verified "S" wasn’t in her house, grabbed the dog and climbed back down the ladder.  The good news is, “S” is now in detox and her dog is in the care of a local vet until she is ready to get him back.

Thor

I was minding my own business driving around when my phone rang, and I recognized the number, it was 5-0.  And I was just about to take a long walk on the beach, too.

So anyway, they said I had to meet them under the bridge between the beach and the town, and impound a dog so they can take his owner to jail.  So I show up, and I see a cruiser parked under the bridge with its lights on and a pile of stuff on the sidewalk.  I get out of my truck and I don't recognize the cops, (it turns out they are switching shifts or some other shit and they don't normally work that area.)

They are busy fooling with radios and clip boards and whatever they do, so I walk over to the pile of paper and plastic bags and stuff and there is a frigging ginormous pitbull leashed to the crash bar up front.  My boy!

Me:  Hey, Thor!
Thor:  (was sleeping on the curb, slowly gets up, shakes his sleep off, sticks out his tongue and wags his tail.)
Cops: How did you know his name?
Me: Is that Phil in your car?
Cops: (A little incredulously) Yeah! He was passed out on the sidewalk, we don't know who the fuck he is.
Me: Can I talk to him for a quick sec?
Cops: Sure! (They open the door.)
Me: Hey, Phil, it's me, Animal Control again! I'm taking Thor with me, he'll be fine, just come up and get him when you get out!
Phil: igjpjg fopgjp gj pgjfs
Me: I'll give my card to these guys to put in your shit so when you get out you have my number, okay?!
Phil: flih dsfihr5 lhfs
Cops: Holy fuck, how do you know this guy?
Me: My third, my partners have a couple each though.  What's his charge?
Cops: He's got warrants for public intoxication, illegal camping, shoplifting, defrauding an innkeeper, resisting arrest, trespassing, simple assault, possession of less than an ounce, possession of paraphernalia, possession of stolen property, and harboring an unlicensed dog.
Me:  The dog's current.
Cops:  (Pause.) He'll be out tomorrow.
Phil:  fsh5ja pif 9jfl

I let Thor ride shotgun, he's the balls. I think it runs in the family though, I was feeding him treats while we were driving around but he was more interested in licking the bottle of hand sanitizer in the center console.