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!