Short Video of ACO vehicle accident

Next in order is this short video was from a late day vehicle accident an ACO had been involved in.
Luckily for me, not so much for the girl and unlike some of the other emergencies like this I had to go out to, this happened close by to the San Bernardino office in Colton. Only about 10 minutes away. So my response time was fast.

The call came in that she had been involved and I drove out and had to get off the westbound I-10 and then right back on the east bound lanes of Interstate 10. The clips shows that I saw it and couldn't get to it as the vehicles were at the center divider so I waited until she can get going since her truck wasn't damaged beyond the ability to be driven. She got going and over the radio we talked and said the truck could be driven to the shelter so it could be unloaded. She actually had been heading towards the shelter anyway as it was the end of the day and she was on call that night. So I follow her to the shelter where the rest of the video was taken.

She said and says in the video that she was just driving along in the heavy traffic and the car apparently blows a tire and the driver lost control shooting across the other lanes of traffic and right into the Animal Control Truck. She had recently gotten back this truck, it had been a brand new truck and she had gotten assigned the truck. But then she started having truck problems, breakdowns, accidents, and especially with this accident, she began to say that this truck, a Dodge Ram, must have been "possessed"!

This was just an example of the things I did as a supervisor video. Every time an employee was involved in any kind of accident, incident or injury, a supervisor was supposed to go out and check it out and do any necessary reports. I was out on many injuries, accidents, with trucks backing into things being the most common. I would think that by now the trucks would have back up monitors like many cars have.

I recall meeting up and feeling so sorry for the ACO's injured or bitten. One girl had been used as a escape route for a cat when the cat had worked loose from her control stick and had grabbed her leg and dragged it's way up her leg while she tried to pull the cat away with the control stick. It was pretty bad.

This girl wasn't hurt just shaken up pretty good. She just cleaned out her truck and got another one from the next days supervisor.

August 2001 Multi Agency response in Landers

Next in my videos is this call from August 2001. By now I was a Supervisor since September 2000, and I was asked to go out and respond with many ACO's and the desert supervisor to a multi-agency response for an Illegal kennel in the "low desert".

This kennel had been a problem for months, years!
Well back in the acreage and surrounded by fencing and locked gates, Code Enforcement and other County agencies had been battling the owner for years and were never able to get compliance with all the violations and the area neighbor complaints. Then the owner I knew of, and elderly lady, had to be hospitalized, and the people care taking the property were overwhelmed by the situation and went to the County for "help" and to, they thought anyway, help her; the owner.

So this big response was organized and here it was taking place on a Wednesday, and if there was a choice of the day of the week, Animal Control preferred Wednesdays because that was the 'overlap' day for the shifts and had the most staff working. So employees could be pulled for the day and there was still barely enough for adequate coverage.
I had gotten a "dog truck" from the valley and even the newest field ACO was told to drive out from San Bernardino, over 2 hours away. Stacy with the desert supervisor in her truck and me in the truck I had drove out from the Victorville area, over an hour and half away, we all got up and out early to arrive at the staging area around 8:30 in the morning in Yucca Valley, and then all convoy out to the property.

That is what much of this video is, briefly the arriving and then the driving out to the place. I left it mostly in the video since I had recorded quite a bit of the audio from the service radios in the truck of Sheriff's Dispatch in the Victorville area and of Animal Control's dispatch which was in the office in San Bernardino.

I really wish I had had the money to have the very pricy smaller video cameras that were just coming out back then. Still, I only recorded mostly the drive and not the action because that was the easiest to record with one very large camcorder! So many better and micro small cameras are available in this digital age over what was there in the analog age of only 1o years ago! As I've said in one of these other posts, the ability to have cameras and video is so relatively inexpensive and of so much better quality, were I still in the business I'd have a rolling studio with cameras!

Anyway, as you'll see in the video, after the fairly long drive to the place, we all arrived at the property and the leader Code Enforcement and Sheriff vehicles, loaded with warrants and already researched violations, cut the lock and opened the gates so everybody could get in. Then we drove the winding path to the main "house" and the makeshift animal pens. Every animal on the property was to be impounded and taken away.

As everybody was just starting I quickly walked through showing the bulk of the pens on the property. All the generations of inbred fairly feral and mostly untouchable dogs in all the hot, dusty, pretty poor quality pens for the conditions an owner being one of those "animal lovers"!

The rest of the video shows several of the ACO's in the process of capturing dogs in one of the pens. Those "control sticks" we all had were good things to have I can guarantee, but also could be cumbersome and difficult to use, especially in situations like this with close quarters and hiding areas for the dogs. It took hours to get the dogs mostly caught. I think a few did escape during the day. Then the last seen is of a run to an area shelter were the dogs were taken, over and over during that day.
The overall outcome from all the effort and work to get them all picked up was pretty much wasted after only a few days when the owner had "lawyered up" from the hospital and the county wound up giving most if not all of the surviving dogs back! Quite a few had been euthanized at the shelters for being too sick or too aggressive.

Just a day in the life!

High Desert Cruelty Call- March 2000

In trying to keep the few videos I have in order this one is the next one up.
It was one of those late in the day guaranteed overtime calls on a Saturday, my Friday, night that had to be handled "per the Supervisor".
That usually meant that enough complaints had come in that it could have become a major problem publicity wise. So I got the call.
This property was in the El Mirage area of the county and at least with this kind of call, as long as animals didn't have to get picked up, it was just the one call then home.
I now don't recall if I was carrying the camcorder with me that day or if I had asked Stacy to meet me and bring it with her, but the video was taken with the RCA full size VHS camcorder so it wasn't too easy to carry around in the truck.
The call was many animals, too many actually for the area zoning, and they were not being cared for properly. This usually meant dirty or dilapidated pens or corrals, little or no food and or water, and too much poop build up. And in this case it was a combination of most of them!
We arrived and found that nobody was home at the house on the property and as there was no parameter fence-line we easily drove back to the area of some pens and walked around from there.
While we were there checking out the place a neighbor driving by noticed the animal control trucks and stopped to see what was going on. Nosy or not he was were we got most of the information about the place than we had surmised from checking the property out.

First thing we found was all the pens had no water or the level was so far down the animals couldn't reach it. Even though this was in March in the high desert, animals always needed constant access to clean water. Animals such as the numerous pigs and chickens don't do well with no water around.
We couldn't find a way to get the water system working to get water flowing to the area of the pens. The neighbor when he got there, said that the pump to get it out that far was broken. So we started to haul out five gallon buckets of water using empty containers we found.
As the video shows the pigs went crazy for the water they were so thirsty and I recall refilling their water container several times before there was any water left standing in their pen.

And it was the same story with almost all the animals so it appeared to us that the animals had been without water for a day at least. After we got everything watered then it was go back and take a closer look at the true conditions of the animals.
As the video shows, several horses and a group of the cattle and goats were in pretty bad condition. Most people didn't know, or care, that the sandy desert soil, especially if the animal didn't have much area to walk in or exercise in causes their hooves to grow without any wearing down that would happen in the wild or in other areas of the county. A horse should have hooves checked and trimmed every eight weeks and cattle and goats too if needed. So as you can see in the video, horses with hooves too long and the cattle with their hooves so long it would be close to permanently injuring their feet in several pens.
Then it was all the illegal animals on this property, the fighting roosters, all illegal. You were only allowed to keep up to 5 roosters out there, but roosters kept in the cages that all those were housed were generally only kept for fighting purposes. The number of large livestock, all illegal except for the 9 large animals that would have been allowed to be kept for the size of the property. And ordering a vet and farrier check on all of them? VERY expensive, but that's what the Notice of Violation left on their door at the house said.
An N.O.V. gave a finite amount of time, usually starting at 30 days for something like this, to get going on working on correcting the violations listed on the form.
All told I'm thinking it was about two hours for both myself and Stacy to water and check all the animals at this place. The next workday, Wednesday for me, I turned in the original video to the main office for the "Investigator" to review and check into.
I remember making one check back a few weeks later to see what if anything had been done. Not much except the water was working again to the pens. I got the usual excuses about taking time finding a Vet they afford to come out and on and on. Then the Investigator and Code Enforcement had the ball, I no longer remember if they dropped it or not!
Main thing for me was in July, just a few months later, I got bitten in the head by the Rottweiler on a call in Fontana, got office duty for a few weeks and then got hired on as the new Wednesday to Saturday Shift Supervisor.