Just Whose Jurisdiction Is This Anyway?

So again it has been a while since posting my thoughts and memories of my career in Animal Control.
So many things happened in a day and all those days! Almost 25 years worth, how to remember it all?

The one thing that lately has been reminding me most of that job? The TV show Southland.
I remember posting about the show when it first started, in that very first episode, the newbie had a dead person locked in a house with a aggressive dog and how they handled it by calling out the area ACO to get the dog out first.
Now, a whole lot more happens on that show than I or anyone else in our department had to deal with, but some of the scenes in this new season of the show are situations that I, as well as many in the department, did deal with!

In recent episodes there were segments like this one, the police cruzer comes across a crazy naked guy jogging/ running in the street, they tell him to run a direction and then continue on commenting about how he's another areas jurisdiction now, so they're done. Of cousre we didn't do that with people, but with dogs we did!
The backstory to this is that many of our areas came to boundaries of other area cities, like an unincorporated area we'd be in would butt up against the City limits of San Bernardino, or the City of Rialto, or the City of Fontana, or even Riverside County is some sections. So I, or we, would be out chasing a dog or dogs that were actually still there when we'd finally get to the call.
This scenario was most often in the spring and fall when the female dogs were in heat and packs of male dogs were around for that. But this type of call could also be any time of the year if a dog had taken up residency in a neighborhood (don't feed the strays!!!).

Many dogs would look at you and run away, until it was near it's own house. Then the dog would often stand there and start barking at you or the truck you're in. That's a different situation though, I'm talking about the dog or dogs that would just run around and around in an area. Never stopping at any house or place just running to get away. I or we would chase it around trying to get the dog to go into any yard or go into an area where we could corner and catch it. Many did just that, many did not though and some of those would take off and run anywhere. So if we'd spent a lot of time chasing it and it was apprent we weren't going to catch it, and we could 'steer it' towards a nearby cities boundary limits, that's what we'd do! Sometimes we'd call dispatch and let them know to call that cities Animal Control before leaving the area, sometimes not and just indicate "UTC" or 'Unable to Catch' on our Daily Report Form for that call. Then it was drive on to the next call and hope we wouldn't get called back for this one!

Another segment was a bit greusome. In the show the police respond to a call to meet up with the Railroad Police because a person had been hit and disected by a train and was litterally, all over the place, around the tracks. So whose call was it going to be? The railroad cops didn't want it and the police didn't either. What part was "more of him" on?
Well, in the show the female officer is aruging over her cell phone with another govermental agency about a different problem and in hearing her getting pissed and arguing with the agency the railroad police relent and take the responsibility for the cleanup.
So imagine the same or a similar situation with dogs or cats. There were several areas with tracks running through them. Sometimes dogs would be in the wrong place wrong time and get clobbered by the fast running  Metro Link trains. Those trains flew through areas and sometimes due to the speed, dogs got hit. Especially since many areas of the tracks were blocked off by block walls to help with noise and prevent free access for safety. But animals would get in there and when scared by the vibration and noise they'd run and run back into the trains.
Sometimes though, area kids would find a dead animal, usually killed by a car in the street, and they'd take and put the animal on the tracks, just to see what happens I guess, and let a train hit it.
We'd get the call and pick up the pieces we could get. The worst time was when this call happened for us in the hot summer. Those days it didn't take long at all for the entire mess to smell really, really bad.

A similar situation would be a call in an area that was so close to that invisible boundary that it could be our call or not. These calls were the most annoying if was almost "quittin' time" or at night when on call. If there was a 'R-P', Reporting Party, the thing to do was call and try to get more information before heading out. As I have posted before though we couldn't usually be certain that the On-Call Duty Officer had actually done anything more than tell the Answering service to "send the area officer" even though they were supposed to check the information of the call.
Quite often though, and I expect it's all worse now since many more people have cell phones then back then, the person calling was just "driving by" and saw the animal get hit and didn't know after that or saw it run off and didn't know where it went. So, what would you do?

Yeah the money was good enough to just take a drive to see if you could find it. And sometimes you actually could find the injured animal, usually a dog by the way. Cats were almost never still alive after getting hit. But you couldn't be sure, do you really want to go?
Sometimes you could, and I did if it was a 'sketchy' call, wait and see if any other calls came in about it. Then go if they did and worry about it if they didn't! But would you want to be the gambler?
Even when I was a supervisor with this kind of call I often would hold off to see if anyone else called in about it before sending someone.
And if the call was close by? No reason NOT to go. Then you'd be looking at a 'triple time call' especially if you could be there and back in less than an hour. No, I'm talking about the calls where you'd be looking at forty-five minutes to an hour or more just to get there! But then you're a gambler again because if the animal was still alive and not too bad off then it was a trip to the 24 hour vet clinic and then shelter afterword. More money? yes, but more hours of no sleep too!

But, you get out there and it's too late. Animal didn't make it, often the outcome. And you find that it is on the wrong side of the street, or on the wrong corner of the intersection, one area had three of the four corners of an intersection in the City of Fontana, only one was County. Or the animal is in the gutter when the County starts on the grass. What then?
First I'll say right off the top, if I had gone all the way out to the call I'd just pick it up. It didn't matter to me, I'm already there! Just throw it in the dead box in the back and go home and impound it the next day at the shelter. I know of many ACO's though that chose not to pick it up because it wasn't in 'our' area, only to get the call again later because someone would drive by and see fur "move", from the wind usually, and swear the animal was still alive lying there in pain. Then they'd have to drive back out and pick it up anyway!
I never did this, but I did hear bragging about it over the years, an ACO actually dragging the animal to the city area just so they wouldn't have to pick it up. As I said above, if I was there, to me there was no reason not to pick it up!
Actually, that August night that Princess Diana was killed I was out on a call, "HBC", Hit By Car, "dog alive across from Serrano High School in Phelan". Came in about 2 AM. This was before XM Satellite radio so I often listened to 'skip' AM stations when out on call at night. I listened to KSL from Salt Lake City as they were live from London talking about the accident and that she had been killed. As this was close to where I lived I was there in less than a half hour but the dog was dead too, a very large dog that had not been dead too long but had been hit too hard to make it. I put it in the truck and went home. As I wasn't working the next day, I had another area ACO come by and pick it up and take it to the shelter.

Till next time

Just a short post for the moment, I've been really busy since August so haven't been able to update.  But I thought I would note a milestone of sorts, if I still worked for the S.B. County that is. Today would have been 30 years in were I still there. I can think of only two or three from my "era" that are still there.

3o years ago today was a Monday, 11/02/1981, and I was a nervous new employee at San Bernardino County Animal Control.
I took the job when offered because of my liking working with animals and pets, although you really don't work that much with animals, it was really a people job, and because of the security of a county job.  And I thought back then that I'd work it for a while until 'something better' came along. Nothing did for 25 years! Then getting "outta Dodge" and leaving California came along!!!
I wouldn't go back.

But I do like remembering and writing these memories about all those years.

The Fires of October 2003

This is a relatively short, 12 minute video compiled from videos I had taken during the 2003 "Grand Prix" and "Old" Fires of October in San Bernardino County.

What follows is a repost of a blog I wrote in October 2008 about this topic of the Fires of 2003. I couldn't really go into much more of the story than this post! Then it was 5 years, now it is almost the 8th anniversary of theses events;


I was on the Internet watching with interest about the annual firestorms that have become as normal down in our old area of Southern California, as the leaves turning gold up here.

Rewind to November 1981 and I was a new employee of San Bernardino County Animal Control, and just a little over a year before there had been the devastating Little Mountain fire that had taken out most of the homes in the North end of San Bernardino. So most of the people working there then had their stories of all seen and done during those fires. For many it had been the biggest event to be involved with in their entire lives. Back then and for many years, fires happened in the late summer and while most were quick brush fires, seldom did the fires just keep coming with the mass devastation to San Bernardino County that there has been since the summer of 2003.

Of course many things have changed to make it to get to where it is now. Whether it is due to global warming or the continued evolving of the Earth isn't the topic here.
But the climate had changed in the area. I remember when I was in elementary school we were barraged with the impending ice age that was being predicted.
But I also recall summers that had changed over the years from dry heat to almost always moist and thunder stormy for much of the summer months. I remember winters that went from what seemed like rain at least once a week all winter to maybe a week or less max for all the fall and winter.
So all the trees and plants in the area would be green in the spring and brown in the mid summer. With the change in weather patterns that became green in the winter with the rains and dead and brown most of the rest of the year!
In the mountains the continuing drought caused the forests to be susceptible to bugs and disease. It apparently went on pretty much unnoticed for many years by most people and agencies. Lots of dead trees here and there.

Now we're up to early 2003. The dead trees are noticed. It was estimated back before all the fires began to happen in May 2003 that the forest was as much as 80% dead in sections, with the overall forest health at over 60% dead trees. Jokes were made about the "California Golden Pine" in reference to all the dead trees in the San Bernardino mountains.
So committees were formed, hearings were held, what would be the 'worst case scenario' since so many people were now full time residents of the mountain communities? I attended several of those hearings, the biggest was a day long think and discuss tank at the Lake Arrowhead lodge and was put on by a formed organization called the Mountain Area Safety Task force (MAST). With representatives from local and state law enforcement, fire departments, local and state road and highway departments and community leaders, scenarios were discussed, evacuation plans were devised and everybody mainly hoped for the best.

The scenario that became the 'model' as most plausible to occur was this, mountain resident decides to remove the dead tree in his yard. While cutting it down, since this citizen is not equipped to properly and safely remove a tree, a section of it falls on any nearby power lines and causes the lines to arc igniting the tinder dry dead tree. The fire spreads very rapidly and other nearby dead grasses and trees also ignite. It was anticipated that this scenario would be out of control in less than 20 minutes if there were any breezes at the time. Still handle-able for a few hours with minimal structure loss with no winds. No one was anticipating the annual strong Santa Ana winds in the equations.

M.A.S.T. getting into action, has the four main highways up the mountains closed and they become one way, down, to facilitate evacuations. The mountain school buses would evacuate any and all summer camps in the areas being evacuated, then assist with civilian evacuations of those effected areas.

That was the general plan anyway. Cal-Trans left piles of fold up barriers at all the major intersections to facilitate road closures. People were told via the press, and on local TV and radio stations to be ready 'just in case'. Nobody expected the entire mountains to ever have to be evacuated, just areas at a time with the Lake Arrowhead area as a likely first fire spot.

The first event occurred in June 2003 below the Running Springs area and started almost halfway up the mountain from the Highland area. It was bad but was pretty quickly handled with only some evacuations required. A second fire in the almost same area of Running Springs in early September '03 was MUCH worse with most of the village evacuated and this fire was to be the start of the worst fire season in San Bernardino County for several years.

It started on September 5th and if I'm remembering correctly it began with the classic smoker throwing out a still lit cigarette, it lands in the dry weeds and with the winds from passing vehicles to fan it, starts a fast moving grass fire. This time though, the grass starts the dead trees and between the grass and trees it pretty quickly works its way up the mountains towards Running Springs. With all the dead growth in the areas, no chances were taken. Very quickly mandatory evacuations were ordered. Our department was also mobilized to help evacuate peoples pets and livestock. Minimal staffing was kept in the valley with everyone else being sent to the fire. The staff from the valley met at the first ICP (Incident Command Post) with the two mountain officers already working at the evacuations. As the fire burns through the area of the Command Post, it gets moved up the mountain area to a flat lot in the Running Springs area itself. So up we all went got set up and then start coordinating evacuations with transfers of those pets to the shelter for housing. People were sent out in teams of two per truck to facilitate rapid removal of whatever animals were at the residence they were sent to. Luckily there were only a few large livestock animals that had to be moved.
That fire became a four day event. Staff were assigned for 24 hour coverage although most all animal evacuations were taken care of the first day and a half. The new Animal Control "Command Post" consisting of a 24 foot long toy hauler trailer with a service radio and generator installed, was used for the first time. Before that, all nighters such as these were spent sleeping in the front seat of a standard sized truck cab. NOT FUN as I know from my personal experience! I'll always wish the county had gotten extended cab trucks back then!

So, that fire was a first test of responses, plans and such, and I know a lot of people were hoping the worst had occurred.

Turned out it was only a small taste of what was to happen in the fall, when the Santa Ana winds always blow.

The rest of the summer there were fires all over the area. Some good sized ones but no "big" ones. In late October 2003 just as now, the Santa Ana's were blowing pretty strong. At the bottom of the Cajon Pass wind gusts can and often do, exceed 60 mph. It was a "Indian Summer" warm day with the winds blowing pretty strongly. Early on a Saturday afternoon I heard about a fire that had started in the area of the Old Waterman Canyon road which was the old highway that was bypassed by the new highway up the mountain. Later it came out that it had been intentionally set by a guy in an older Chevy Astro van. People had seen it being started but with the winds it went from small to totally out of control in a about two hours.
Just 6 hours later it had spread and was working rapidly up towards the town of Crestline. By that evening it was mandatory evacuations, and within three days the entire mountain from Crestline to Big Bear was being evacuated. This fire was given the name "The Old Fire" for the point of origin in Old Waterman Canyon. Less than a week later it was evacuations for EVERYBODY that lived in the mountains. Many residents were caught off guard and many more were caught while down in the valley and were unable to return home. People in many areas had just a few hours to pack up and get out. As most thought it would be just for a few hours, they didn't concern themselves with packing up the pets and taking them with them.

As the fire progressed, many areas of the mountains lost all power. Pets were locked up in homes with no food or water available but what was left out for them or the dogs and cats that could drink from the toilets, many exotic fish were lost in tanks with no filters or power. With owners not able to return, calls began to come in with requests to get the left behind pets out. The department had been working 24/7 to evacuate animals, now it was stepped up as much as possible. Prior permission was gotten to as carefully as possible break in to most of the homes to gain access to the confined animals. Of course, some access was more careful than others, the one I remember being told about was the residence where the front door broke free falling into a glass coffee table and glass shelves breaking a lot of items. Then after getting the animals the door was secured as good as possible until a local wandering black bear got into the house through the broken front door.

As the days went on several homes were entered only to find that the pets had died from lack of food and water. The Humane Society of the United States rolled in and with their crews, they helped take up the slack by the now exhausted staff of the department. As the fire had burned through most of the western most communities by now, the mission shifted to getting food and water for house bound pets and no longer removal. So the teams continued to get into homes, and would leave enough food for several days. Although several Red Cross Evacuation Centers were set up in the general area, many mountain residents were being housed at the old Norton Air Force Base facility due to its proximity.
An area was set up for holding owned dogs and cats there also. Many owners were shocked and upset when they found out that Red Cross centers would not accept pets with the owners. So at those facilities there were problems with people keeping pets in their cars while staying there.

Glen Helen, a county park most famous for concerts and for having the US Festival in the 1980's, is at the intersections of the freeways I-15 and I-215 at the base of the Cajon Pass. This became the main "Fire Camp" and became the joint command post for most all the involved agencies. It was an impressive site seeing hundreds of tents, thousands of firefighters, as well as a city worth of trailers, motor homes and equipment for the fighting of the two giant area fires. The Sheriff's department rodeo grounds at Glen Helen became the area for storing livestock from Devore to Big Bear, about 60 miles of communities. Even a Zoo from Big Bear had several of their large animals stored for a time during the fires when Big bear itself was evacuated.

In the end it was the weather that stopped the fires. It lasted until just after Halloween a little over two weeks if I'm remembering correctly. I do remember being told by a Fire Commander that if the weather hadn't gotten colder and rainy and the winds had not died down, they were not going to be able to stop it until it burned all the way to Big Bear. It was a fire so big it couldn't be stopped by all the people and technology they had for fire fighting.

For us, well Stacy started out with the rescue teams then was sent to the livestock holding facility at Glen Helen as it was being set up. There she was in charge of the facility. I was on some of the rescue teams in the Big Bear area, transported supplies to staff in the valley and the mountains, transported livestock to Glen Helen. I worked the Com Center emergency response command center which was a room with representatives from all the area agencies each with a desk and a phone to take calls or questions from the public or the media, answered many, many phone calls from concerned people from wanting to know about their pets to people from all over the state and country wanting to volunteer or help.

Our daughter Laura was working at the Rancho Cucamonga shelter then, so she was working there and transporting animals.

It was over 6,000 animals that were taken in for the fires. Over 150 large animals and goats were kept at Glen Helen, with many more sent as far as 100 miles away by their owners through private transports.

Yes it was lots of memories for us and everybody involved. Would I say it was our shining moments that defined us in the department? I wouldn't, as it was just a few weeks out of my 25 year career there, and I had a lot of 'adventures'!

Yes there was excitement, a lot of aggravation with our own department, a lot of lost sleep, and a lot of money made with all the mandatory overtime. I have video I took, news stories I recorded on the VCR at home, and several people got together photos of what they'd seen and people that wanted those got them.

I'm sure with the almost every year fires and evacuations new employees are getting their chances to have their memories to talk about a few years after.

Very Short Video of working at a call

It has been a while! All I can say is it got very busy the last couple of months and a very important relative passed away.

So, back to posting these videos and descriptions.

This very short video was taken in 2002 or 2003 I believe. I was called out to assist on this call since I was by now a supervisor and had a pick up truck instead of a 'dog truck' and carried cages and traps. I took the video at a house in Yucaipa, California, which was (and still is last time I checked on-line) a contract city.
It was the all too common call of too many cats in too small a house and family members were concerned to the point that they too action themselves.
The video is pretty self explanatory as videos go like this, I arrived and the guy was just going to catch and hold the cats. That NEVER worked because the cats would know 'somethin's up' and would scratch and bite to keep the person (or you) from from taking or putting them someplace they DO NOT want to go!
And when we got there we were to try and take 'charge' of the call and try to prevent the people from getting hurt too much. Situations like this one though, also common, were when citizens wanted the problem taken care of without ever going in their house.

Although not in the video, another ACO arrived and also helped take the cats from the house to the trucks. Bad part for the cats like these was that since they were almost all kind of 'wild' and in this case were picked up as "owner release" which meant they would generally be 'toast' as soon as they got to the shelter.

But this was the average kind of call everybody got every week, sometimes several times a week!

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.