Animal Lovers and Problems

"Animal Lovers"

Many of us 'in the business' used to literally cringe at the words "I'm an animal lover". Seems like so often the people that would utter those words, while they may have truly thought they were, but so often they were the problems themselves!
While many 'citizens' could be lucid and intelligent, many that uttered that phrase were, to put it bluntly, a little nuts when it came to animals. Too many of this, not enough of that, they often had the money to generally take care of their pets, but if it came down to taking an injured pet to the vet or have to spend more than they'd think was right, then it was try to skimp and get by with something much less than necessary.
I went to many, many homes with animals running around all over the place and yet they'd often be more than willing to take in more and more of whatever so in their mind they were showing how much they loved animals!

Collectors
Kind of along the same line as the people above, collectors are the people that just can not stop getting more and more and more of their animals. Dogs, cats, mice, horses, goats, couldn't tell what a collector might have, although I usually handled calls about dogs, cats and horses.
When to stop, and how could they stop? I never knew. Now there have been all kinds of studies done about people like this and it has now been classified as an Obsessive Compulsive Disorder condition, but through most of my years in the department people like this just had 'a problem'.
I recently got to see a program on Animal Planet that I'd recorded a month or so ago, a compilation show from Animal Cops all about various collector homes that had been raided. If you want to see what it could really be like, try to see this show. Most can not imagine how bad it really can be. And after you see it you wonder how could they live like this???
I think it was the first home I was at that was a collectors home, it was a very small, just a few hundred square feet for the whole residence. What started our involvement was the owner had gone to the local hospital for treatment of a severely infected cat bite on her arm. On the follow up check by the area animal control officer, we always had to follow up with doctor and hospital reported animal bites, it was discovered that the owner lived in this small house with about 60 to 90 cats/kittens.
It was quite a shock, that first home. You can not believe the ammonia smell, I can't even think of a way to describe it to you. Before I'd left the department had begun to get full coverage masks with breathing filters for these places, but back then everybody just inhaled it all in.
I was one of 4 ACO's sent to get the cats gone from the place. You'd go in the front door and and have to walk up a hill of piled up cat litter. Then it was walking elevated on the cat litter pile all through the house. What she'd do is just make layers on top of layers of the cat litter as the cats would poop in it. She was very elderly lady that lived alone and I guess just didn't have the energy anymore to keep after all the cats she had in her tiny house. News papers, cat litter, old cat food bags and cans, just narrow pathways to various points in her place. Her kitchen was just as bad as everywhere else, old moldy dishes, pots and pans in her sink and on her counter along with empty cans etc. We opened her fridge to find it a living lesson in mold formation. I expected stuff to be crawling out of the thing when we opened it. Nothing was fresh and I have no idea what she ate unless it was the same as her 'pets'.
Catching cats was never really easy with the 'Catch Pole' we had. It could be done but was time consuming and cats would literally bounce off the walls and tear up and down curtains and any cloth furniture in a house. Many places this bad also often had cats living inside furniture since they make holes into the backs of them and raise babies there. It took hours but most all were caught and taken to the shelter. To be honest in situations like this especially for cats, in my opinion, it was more 'humane' to get a owner release and just PTS or euthanize them as soon as we got to the shelter. It may seem the height of cruelty, but most often in places with this many cats almost all but a very few would be totally feral and untouchable by anyone, even the owner. And due to the close unsanitary conditions many cats (or dogs) would usually be sick with various diseases or from various injuries like fights among themselves.

I went to a call at a home less than a mile from our department offices in San Bernardino where the owner had bred and kept over 40 Chihuahuas all loose in the house with her. This call was the response from a neighbor complaint that they had finally felt that maybe there were a few too many dogs there. The day that a fellow officer got there to investigate the complaint, he found that the owner had kind of lost her marbles that day. He told me that he found the owner, a 70's aged woman, lying naked on the floor trying to strangle one of her dogs. She was taken to "Ward B" for psychological evaluation, but all the dogs had to be taken to the shelter since there was no one there at the house to care for them. Chihuahuas can live into their high teens or even early twenties so there were several of these dogs at least that old! Really old Chihuahuas can quite often have no teeth and problems keeping their tongues in their mouths. Skinny, gray haired and can't keep their tongues in, talking about the dogs here. At the advanced ages they do become fragile and have to be carefully handled.
But small dogs like Chihuahuas bring a flood of people wanting to adopt and rescue them so all that could found new homes.

I went to a couple of different homes, one with dogs and one with cats, that were gross and disgusting like the ones I've mentioned, but were different in the fact that the owners were people in the medical field! Nurses to be exact, the dog owner a guy the cats a lady. Actually the guy was the worst, I couldn't imagine this guy working at a major regional hospital taking care of people yet going home and living in such a filthy place. He was so bad that he didn't bother to 'go to the bathroom', he'd just go to the bathroom where he was! There were gallon jugs all around his recliner, all around his living room and kitchen, and all full of his urine. What he was going to do with it I never found out, and a few days after all the dogs were taken away there was a 'mysterious' fire that burned the place down. Rumor I'd heard months afterward was the people that owned the house had found out how bad it was inside and thought it was better to start from scratch instead of the cost of clean up to a habitable standard.

The cat lady? well she just couldn't bare to see any cats gotten rid of. She had a friend that worked at a local veterinarian's office that when a cat was brought to the office that she thought was still healthy but just no longer wanted, it would just disappear from the vet's office after it was to have been euthanized and wind up at this owners house. She was up to 45 when I met her. She had no carpet in most of her house from the cats wrecking it by using it as a bathroom. She kept sheets and blankets on all the windows where someone might see in to see what was going on in her house. The cats had the run of the place even sleeping all over the bed with her and her husband. Actually this was one of the very few times that it was a couple in this situation, it was most often a single person, and an elderly single person at that. Anyway boxes of kitty litter all over the house, but you can not kill the smell when there are that many cats there too, so it really stank which was how we'd gotten the call to check it out. A neighbor down the way as these were not close tract houses had gotten tired of the smell blowing down their way, done some checking and had seen several cats. They never knew it was 45 though! In this case none were ever taken except at her request. The owner got a bunch of people she knew to take most of them for her and some had to actually be PTS'd due to illness, but that was all at her doing. I went back several times over several months to make sure she wouldn't take them all away to comply then bring them all back after she thought the 'coast was clear'. She'd apparently used this as an opportunity to get a new start like she said she'd do. Good for her! Although now almost 5 years later, if I was down there she'd probably have 100 by now!

Well, with interruptions this has taken a few hours so I guess that's it for this time.
Tad

Back Yard Horse Calls

Much of the areas I really liked to work over the years were rural areas.
Because they were rural or still semi-rural areas then I responded to many, many calls about large animals and livestock.
The most common call?
It was the "back yard" horse.
You had to have at least a half an acre in many areas to have a horse. Actually, two horses could be had on half an acre. But it was most often the large enough lot, but the horse was kept in a 12 foot by 12 foot pipe corral.
OK, so it was a legal size, I always felt and said it should be a minimum of a 24 by 24 size but I couldn't make them get a bigger one if they had a legal sized corral with only one horse in it. The definition of any adequate size confinement was the ability for the animal to walk about and turn around freely in it's 'space'.

Problem was the same kind of not really ready for it as the "impulse puppy" gotten from out front of the super market, the 'we gotta get the kids a horse' was often just as bad if not sometimes worse! Spend a few hundred dollars, get a corral, just some food and water, that's all it takes right? SO wrong!
In my opinion, horses are a pretty expensive hobby! Good hay isn't cheap, an annual vet check really is needed, usually a farrier is needed to take care of the feet about every two months and that's whether you ride or not. Proper ownership of an animal like a horse in an urban area like Southern California is an expensive proposition!

And most often while the intention is good, after a while the interest would wane by the kids as they'd get older and want to do other things, but a horse can live to be mid 20's to even early 30's. But the horse was usually 'out back' and the feedings would get missed the water would start to stay dirty, and the horse would just stand there 24-7 & 365 and the poop would get higher and higher since the corral wasn't cleaned out anymore. No vet checks and it would get worms, the rear teeth get too long, the hooves continue to grow and start to look like a slipper. Between the teeth and the worms the horse doesn't want to eat and looses weight, it can't walk because its feet hurt, what a life huh?

So a friend would be visiting or a neighbor would happen to finally notice that something wasn't quite right with the horse next door and they'd call in the always 'anonymous' call of abuse or neglect.
Many of you readers may have seen shows like "Animal Cops" or similar shows on various networks, or even on-line now a days, but what owners thought was OK, or just a 'little' underweight was often pretty bad!

I am not meaning to single out any race of people, but the areas in Southern California I worked were predominately Hispanic, and many of the calls I went to where problems were existing were because many of the people I dealt with felt that "all Mexicans are born horse people" and that they inherently knew all there was to know about horses. That horse wasn't several hundred pounds underweight, it's supposed to be 'lean' because its a racehorse. Those hooves aren't too long, "I trim them myself and I know what I'm doing"!
Well, they often really didn't! Many thought they did though!
In the Muscoy area I went to several calls where the riders had been riding drunk and had an accident, either falling off or a couple of times riding drunk late at night and being hit by a car since the driver didn't see, or expect to see, a dark horse running across the road out of nowhere in the dark because the rider was drunk!

Worst abused horse call in 25 years was a literal skin and bones horse that was so weak it was suspended by ropes inside a small building. The hooves were almost curled all the way around like a slipper. We had a vet make an emergency call out to the house and as it was lowered it collapsed, and after examination the vet determined it was too far gone and could not be saved. The owning family was having money problems, thought the horse could live on scraps instead of a good diet and they just didn't have a clue about caring for it, but it had been given to them and they liked having it there because they just felt they should have a horse! What was really sad about the situation was like the joke of jacking up the flat tire on a car to change it and it doesn't look flat anymore, they'd thought the horse was OK when they'd they'd 'strung it up' because it wasn't falling down anymore.

Most in or near the city calls were about flies, horse poop build up, skinny looking, no water, dirty water, too many for the size lot, too close to 'my' house, on and on and on.
While most of us had no experience as a vet, we had the authority to make the owner pay big bucks to get the animal seen by a real vet! We'd leave a "Notice of Violation" which wasn't a citation or ticket, but it gave the owner from a few hours to as much as a month to 'fix' the problem. With just about any horse issue it meant a vet check. The people that regularly used a vet were often upset because they knew how much it was going to cost them! The ones that didn't use a vet were upset when they found out how much it was going to cost them to get the check. Long hooves meant a check by a farrier, then it was from $35 to $120 a horse depending on the farrier or area. The real high end areas like Rancho Cucamonga had some pretty costly N.O.V's issued by me. A vet check, a farrier check, looking like two to three hundred dollars per horse! And I know I wrote quite a few for two and three horses at various properties over the years i worked out in that West end of San Bernardino county.

It was sad when on a check of the area zoning that stated exactly how many and what kind of animals were allowed at a given property, and the owner had too many of this or that kind of animal. I remember one place was allowed 9 horses, the max at the time anywhere in the county, and they had 20 horses in addition to dogs, cats, goats. Had to give them 30 days to start and reduce down to the "legal limit". That would sometimes stretch out to two or even three months, only as long as the owner was 'trying'. If they weren't working on it, then they just got a ticket and let the Judge make the determination. What owners didn't know is that most Judges really couldn't go against what the area zoning was because if they did, then other citizens could just say, "well what about him?"

Most people just couldn't understand the zoning allowances. They'd say "I've lived out here, in no mans land for _____ years, I got twenty acres (or forty or even once a hundred acres) and you're telling me I can only have 9 horses, and 5 dogs?" "Yes sir, that's all you're legally able to keep". "You're full of S***!"

They didn't get that I personally didn't care what they had, but a neighbor usually, had called in complaining about too many animals, and that complaint was all it took to now make him (or her) comply!

Of course there were many more horses that were properly cared for, taken care of, ridden by caring owners and yes even some real 'horse people' are out there. During the fires in 2003 some owners spent hundreds of dollars to have their animals taken out of harms way. They couldn't get up to their homes, but they cared about their pets!
But I didn't usually meet them!
Till next time, Tad

Guns, Guns, Guns......T-guns to Shotguns

This blog is one I brought over from my family blog about some of my Animal Control experiences with guns.

Tranquilizer Guns:

I had experience with both kinds of these guns, with shotguns it was as a shooter and once almost a shootie!

In the department we were all required to pass P.C. 832, Arrest and Firearms, which included some basic gun range and shooting abilities, so some had more than others as far as gun knowledge went.

A Tranquilizer or "T-Gun" was either a sci-fi looking CO2 cartridge fired pistol, or a 22 caliber blank fired rifle.
Either type uses a hollow aluminum tube of various lengths, as a dart/syringe for getting the tranquilizer drug to the animal. We (the department) usually used the barbed dart tip to try to save on lost darts. EVERYBODY that tried to 'tranq' an animal often missed and darts were often lost. With a barbed tip it was hoped that even with an injury to the animal by the dart, the dart would still be there! Assembled from six parts, when the dart was fired it set off a blank charge inside that would push a rubber plunger in the tube that would force the drug through the hollow tip injector and hopefully into the animal.
One thing that was forever a problem was the public perception of how the tranquilizer actually worked. Seemed like almost everybody had seen an animal show on TV that shows how almost immediately after being darted, the next scene was was usually the animal, from a bear to a elephant, laying down breathing slowly just waiting for the pros' to come and examine or cage the animal.

It never, EVER happened like that in the 'real' world!!

In EVERY attempt I did either myself or while helping other staff in almost 25 years, what usually happened was this; you'd get to a scene and size up what you're up against and trying to dart. For our department it was most often a dog that couldn't be caught any other by any other means. Using a T-Gun was a method of last resort because of its failure rate. We'd have to get help out before you'd even try to tranq a dog or any other animal. You needed chasers to try to follow and keep track of the dog as most took off after they were hit, assuming you could hit them! Being hit with a dart had to hurt!!
If hit there was no scene cut like on TV, it could take 20 minutes or more, for the drug to take effect. And that was if people didn't try to keep up or catch the dog too soon. Adrenaline in the dog could slow the effect of the drug longer or to the point that the dog would never really relax. If just shadowed, not chased, the dog would often be tired then find a place to lay down. You'd still need to be careful to sneak up on the dog since most never were 'out' as much as the TV shows either, and many would get up and start running again.

A lot of 'ifs' here, but if the dog wasn't lost after darting and if the dog/animal was relaxed and resting in an accessible area, and if you could still sneak up and be able to get your "Control Stick" (the aluminum pole with the cable noose through it) and if you're able to get the noose around its neck before it tried to take off running again, you might have actually caught it!

Many dogs were lost after darting, they'd just run off and not be found again. Many would show up again in the area days or even weeks later, sometimes with the dart still hanging off them. Many, many darts were lost because the handgun type of dart guns were not accurate as the distances grew. With those it was the closer the better!

If successfully captured, it was load up the dog and take it to a veterinarian before taking it to the shelter. There was always a nasty wound from the dart itself especially after removal of the barbed tip. Also the drug mixture was never an exact science and it was very easy to overdose and occasionally kill the animal. So to the vet, and after an OK from the vet, then to the shelter to sleep it off and then often spend the last few days of their life in a cage. I darted many, many dogs and even a goat once. Small animals like cats were never darted as even the low power charge had enough energy to kill cats and even small dogs.

In the early years all the field ACO's carried the CO2 type of T-Guns. Most were kept in various stages of rust from not being cared for and most ACO's just left the guns to rattle around under the seat of their truck. Over the years the laws changed and all T-Guns were turned in and Supervisors became the ones to directly deal with these kinds of situations.
To me the CO2 handgun type of T-Gun was pretty much useless. I took care of mine though, kept in a case all clean and dry. But those guns very often had seal problems with the CO2 gas escaping so by the time you'd go to all the effort to get the solution ready, get everything loaded, it would be just like a comedy and when I fired it the dart would go about 20 feet or less in an arc and into the ground. Real professional!
The drug solution could not be mixed in advance, the darts couldn't be left loaded and ready to go, in fact the drug as it evaporated, became like a superglue. Many darts were wrecked that were left with the drug mix in them, stuck NEVER to be opened again!

The T-Rifles were much better to use, much more accurate, and much longer ranged. When I became a supervisor I was able to get one of those type of tranquilizer guns. I was more successful with this type then anything else.

Shotguns:

As for shotguns, only supervisors and most 'outlying' area ACO's carried them. I carried my own until I was issued one. I kept it all cleaned and oiled, ready to go, hoping I'd never need to! I only used my shotgun one time at a call in Helendale California.
Helendale is a small community on the old route 66 route highway called "National Trails Highway" as it runs through San Bernardino County, and about halfway between Victorville and Barstow.
Way out in the hills east of the highway was an old lady that had lived at her small shack house since the late 1940's. No electricity, no piped in water just a water truck and gravity tank she refilled, then had refilled as she got to old to do it herself. Like so many areas the world had grown up around her and after decades of isolation, acreage lots with large expensive homes were going in nearby all around her place. She had amassed through many years and untold generations of never spaying or neutering her dogs, over 100 shepherd mix feral aggressive wild dogs living around her wide open property.
When I first met her on an initial call out to her place over dog complaints, she told me she went through a 50 pound bag of dog food a week. She didn't realize that even that amount wasn't enough for all those dogs, so many also hunted in large packs killing any small animals they found. With the new area homes, her dogs had come across new animals to eat and had killed and eaten several smaller dogs and cats from several area homes.
So it became a "problem" we had to deal with. When I was as I'd mentioned above at her house for my first visit, I found it was a scene I'd come across many times already. Because of her age she wasn't a true collector as many had been. She just wasn't physically capable of dealing with all she hand gotten by not taking care of a few dogs she may have really wanted to keep at one time. She just kept throwing out the food and let the dogs live and die on their own.
Her very small two room dilapidated cabin/shack, was nothing but stacks of books and newspapers with narrow paths going from point to point in the house. A path to her bed, her couch, her bathroom. Outside were decades of old rusting cars, years of rusting empty cans of dog food, piles of empty bags of dog food. All kinds of tables with sun bleached old antiques, toys, more news papers, books and on and on.

We'd made a few attempts to trap but with no effect. She refused to stop feeding the dogs and all the cage type traps we used were food based so if they aren't hungry they won't go in! After numerous threats and bargains, it was decided to have the entire high desert staff meet at the place to "take out" as many as we could to start to solve the problem.
On the first day to try it, we all met out at the place early as most of the dogs were still around the house then. Four of us waited hidden by piles of junk and about a dozen cans of dog food was dumped as bait to get them close by. When they got close we all opened fire, I don't remember exactly how many were shot that morning, we did make a dent in the population though. But it took several more months and a few more hunts (I wasn't involved in those) before it was 'problem solved'.
I never had to do anything like I just described again in any of my years there. Maybe that's why I'm still no mighty hunter living in the land of hunters up here. I didn't get anything from the experience worth repeating!


Over the years I was at several calls, especially after hours or 'on-call', responding to calls with local Police or the Sheriff's Department. These were usually aggressive or 'vicious' dog calls. At one call in the county area of Victorville, I almost got shot by an over zealous Deputy that was in a large back yard with me and another Deputy, the dog was running all over the place while I was chasing it. It was dark with a large dark brown dog running back and forth, one time the dog ran close to the one deputy, with me right there too, and it startled him to where he fired a couple of shots into the ground with his automatic gun! I wasn't afraid of the dog, but after that I sure was afraid of him!

Another call in late 1980's Ontario California and I went out to assist another officer who was at a house to get the aggressive Pit Bull dog that had been causing problems for neighbors. We got there to find the dog chained up to the front porch and the owner either not home or refusing to come to the door with all the police cars, and our two trucks out there. The Police ordered us to get the dog chained up or not and take it away.
So me and Gib go to get the pit, the City PD are standing back both with shotguns ready to fire if there are any problems, ...............WAIT, whats wrong with the picture! Both Gib and I are in the middle BETWEEN a very mean pit bull and two Ontario PD guys and their shotguns pointed at us!
I told them to go put their guns away if they wanted me to get the dog! They did and we got the dog with little difficulty. After we got the dog the PD decided they wanted to make sure no one was home so they went in and found out nobody was there.

One call in a scuzzy area of San Bernardino, (there where many back then!) and as I'm talking to the RP (Reporting Party) about his neighbors dog, they get into a shouting match and the older neighbor goes in and comes back out with a shotgun and is threatening to shot the guy I'm talking to. After several tense minutes talking to this guy, explaining things like jail and prison to him, I get him to put the gun away and we'd all three talk about it. By the time I left, while not "buds" by any means, at least they were civil to each other and agreed to work out the problems.

Ah................, memories!!!!!
Till next time!