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Confession

The last blog hit a nerve with me. The mention of picking up road-kill skunks reminded me of the most evil thing that I ever did. It is confession time.

I was called to a location where a guy was using leg-hold traps in his yard. He was trying to catch his neighbor’s cats and caught a skunk instead. I was so angry that the guy was using leg-hold traps on any animal. I decided to school the guy. I might have gone too far. Way too far.

I planned to tranquilize the skunk and remove it outside our city. Every time I tapped the skunk it would attempt to spray me. I was much faster in those days. It wasn’t until I returned to the neighborhood a few months later that I realized that one tap would have been overkill, but why did I have to tap it six times? The only good that came out of that is that the guy never set that trap again.

Every time I smell the odor of skunk, I feel guilty. I have to live with that.  If you are ever driving through Pullman Washington and smell skunk, I am so, so , sorry.

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Animal Disposal

One of the chief concerns in the animal welfare business is the disposal of dead animals. There is quite a business opportunity in disposing of the dead. But before I get on with this blog, let me provide a grave warning in dealing with skunks.

Animal control is often tasked with scraping up road kill and disposing of the bodies. Skunks are unique in that they can make you the most hated person in the community by bringing a dead skunk into your shelter for disposal. Always carry a shovel in your vehicle and bury the skunk on the roadside. Please don’t attempt to put the skunk in your vehicle or remove it from its current location. Let’s face it, the roadway will stink for months. Burying the animal will not distract from its current level of stink. Just bury it. You might think twice about bringing the shovel back with you. Your vehicle is your office. Do you want it to stink of skunk for three or four months? Bury it along the roadside. This might be the best advice I have ever given to anyone!

In Portland, we had a full-time officer driving around and picking up dead animals. We had a sweet deal with local veterinarians in which we would dispose of their animals. In return, the veterinarians agree to treat any animal that an animal control officer brought to them. It was a great deal because we did not have a veterinarian on staff at the shelter.

There are four methods of disposing of dead animals:

Incineration. This is a costly way to burn animals. It might be the most respectable manner to deal with disposal. Having an incinerator is problematic if your shelter is in a neighborhood. Even though the best incinerators have secondary burners to burn the smoke coming from an animal, it is a foul smell. I can recall seeing someone from the local Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) sitting in front of our animal shelter in Milwaukee watching the smoke come out of our smoke stack. Incinerators can be a problem.

Landfill. It used to be pretty common to take dead animals to the local landfill; but, as time has gone by, fewer and fewer landfills will accept animals.

Rendering. Some companies pick up animals to be rendered into cosmetics. It isn’t commonly available, and it is personally frightening that I might be kissing my wife who is wearing lipstick of an animal that I once killed.

Burial. Some humane societies have cemeteries in which people can bury their pets. Given the volume of animals that animal shelters were once killing made burial cost prohibited.

 

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Drug Shortages

Today, our State announced that they may not be able to perform the killing of an inmate due to a drug shortage.  We don’t do a lot of lethal injections, so experiencing a drug shortage seems silly.  The drug, or drugs of choice are ketamine, fentanyl, and potassium chloride.  We all like our special cocktails.

I bring up this issue because animal shelters experienced a shortage of sodium pentobarbital many years ago.  The shortage lasted over six months.  I have always required that we have a six-month supply on hand at all times.  After the storage, I changed that requirement to a year’s supply.

Although animal shelters are euthanizing fewer animals now, you can imagine the problem of shelter overcrowding should you stop euthanizing altogether.  I was trained early in the Boy Scouts to be prepared.  You should take inventory of your supplies and ensure you can meet a supply shortage.  Carrying a six-month supply might seem excessive until you are hit with a supply shortage.  Be prepared.

UPDATE

It seems that the guy’s attorneys sued the State against their cocktail Du Jour claiming that it was an untested concoction.  That is the problem with fad concoctions.  I’ve seen plenty in our business for remote chemical capture.  They are asking the State to kill their client using the tried and true sodium pentobarbital that we have used in our business for years.  I suspect the one downside of sodium pentobarbital is that it might burn upon administration, but I can’t say for sure because I’ve never used it on myself.  But to be clear, I always anesthetized animals first before administering sodium pentobarbital.

Although, personally, since people are killing themselves every day with fentanyl, I think the State could find someone on the street to test drive this new cocktail.  In the animal welfare business we seem to have a thing for using Acepromazine.  With the fast reversal when using Acepromazine, I always thought that you get the same results using water in the cocktail.  And who would be stupid enough to do that? That’s a hint for the State to not consider adding Acepromazine to their new fancy kill juice.  And using Ketamine… whose idea was that?  It’s like they got this recipe from their local drug pusher.  But to be honest, I used Ketamine in my anesthesia cocktail.

7/26/24 Update:

Prison officials are reporting that the cost of obtaining sodium pentobarbital is going to cost our prison system $200k for the upcoming execution.   Having overseen animal shelter budgets for years,  someone desperately needs to audit our prison system.  It is no wonder that government has become so expensive.  A $20 bottle of sodium pentobarbital is enough to execute a dozen inmates; where is the rest of the money going?

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Corporate Greed

In our business, we depend on other corporate organizations to meet our software needs.  For many years, I used Adobe products to assist me in designing marketing material.  If you spend any time on YouTube, you’ll find Adobe being criticized over their corporate greed.  It has been a long time in coming.  Unfortunately for Adobe, there are other comparable products.  I stopped using Adobe when they first started their subscription service.  I like to be able to buy a product and not have to keep paying ransom to continue using the product.

I recently opened a spreadsheet file and got a notice from Microsoft that my Excel registration was lost.  I could probably search for it, but why bother?  Microsoft is following in Adobe’s footsteps by demanding that I switch to their ransom (subscription) service.  Like Adobe, Microsoft thinks it has the only products out there.  I knew this day was coming, so several years ago I bought a license to the bundle offered by WordPerfect.  The Excel file opened perfectly in Quattro Pro.

Budgets are tight.  If you believe you are being held hostage to your software, start looking for alternatives.  You might be shocked to find a number of open-source (free) business software that is available to you.  These companies are not holding the gun against your head as they think they are doing.  Put them in their place.

I use Corel products for most of my graphic needs.  Affinity is the suggested replacement for Adobe Photoshop.  Although I have Affinity, I usually turn to Corel’s Painter or Paintshop Pro.  I only mention this because I recall that I got the WordPerfect suite through the Corel software.  If you decide to switch to WordPerfect, order the upgrade version if you are using another business suite.  Most companies recognize that your switch from (say) Word to WordPerfect is considered an upgrade in their eyes and you can get the software at half price, around $150.

Corel has a slick plan in which you have the choice of buying the product or renting it.  You can buy Corel Painter for $150 or you can rent it for $100 per year.  The notion is that if you always buy the newest version of a product, then renting it is cheaper because the software is usually updated every year.  With Corel, I find that buying aound Christmas seems to offer the sweetest deals.  But, in my old age, I seem to be fine using a version that is one or two years out of date.  And don’t become like me and feel the need of buying every brush that is available.  They just take up too much diskspace and slow up the loading of the software.  Take if from me, having all of the available brushes will never make you an artist.

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Wolf-Hybrid Dogs

I have to take issue with a headline in today’s news: “Feral Wolf-Hybrid Dogs.” The article is about public health officials conducting a welfare check on an old woman who found that she was living with 40 feral wolf-hybrid dogs. The dogs were seized and euthanized. My issue is pondering whether a wild species being bred into a domestic species can legitimately be identified as feral. A feral animal starts domestic and is turned out by its owner to become wild. A wolf-hybrid is not a feral animal because it was genetically born wild.

Walk back with me a few years… say maybe 30 years when there was a fad of owning wolf-hybrid dogs. Public health officials announced that no tests can be performed to determine if the rabies vaccination administered to dogs would be effective on wolf-hybrids. Even vaccinated for rabies, wolf-hybrid dogs would have to be treated as an unvaccinated animal. The problem with unvaccinated animals biting a human is that the animal would have to be tested for rabies following the incident.

Rabies testing of animals is very hard on the tested animal. It requires that the brain is removed so that tissue can be observed to be infected. In all of the years that I have worked in animal control, I have yet to see an animal that we could put back together. Although, many of the biting animals that we tested actually became better pets after the test.

It was interesting to note that following the public health announcement, the next round of licensing applications saw much fewer dogs being identified as wolf-hybrids. Those who had dogs that were obviously wolf-hybrids were surrendered to individuals who created wolf-hybrid sanctuaries. I was never surprised by reports of these sanctuary owners being eaten by their dogs under their care. You breed in wild, you get wild.

As a species, we never grew smart enough to understand that genetics plays a major role in the behavior of the dogs that we turn into pets. It is that ignorance that becomes job security for those of us who work in Animal Control.

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Our First Priority

The most important priority in government service is to protect the public.  Yet this priority is forgotten with today’s public policies.  Even today, we still encounter folks who want to defund those hired to watch our backs.  Opening our borders was such a mistake at a time when we have diminished police protection.

We are experiencing the same thing in our profession: saving animals’ lives overrides keeping people safe.   The worst of this, I experienced in Virginia.  Animal rescue groups would lie to potential adopters about aggressive traits in the dogs they had for adoption.

I was constantly battling staff, volunteers, and even my board of directors about adopting potentially dangerous dogs.  The problem became so widespread that the Commonwealth of Virginia was forced to write laws making it illegal for animal rescue groups to hide past behavior problems with dogs for adoption.  It is a sad day when you are safer buying an animal from the newspaper than getting it from your local animal shelter.

Today’s politics lead to anxiousness.  I was fortunate, I have always felt that God had my back.  Looking back, I realize how difficult it would have been to do the right thing without my faith.  The world does not have the answers, but the solution is only a whisper away.

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Jurisdictional Chess

Jurisdictions play a chess game in which they push their problems onto other jurisdictions.  It started years ago when dealing with dangerous dogs.  Judges would demand that dangerous dogs be removed from their jurisdiction without thought that they were pushing the problem onto another jurisdiction.  They could effectively solve the problem in their community by putting another community at risk.

I remember working in Jacksonville where our homeless population was growing because “Northern States” would give their homeless a bus ticket to Jacksonville; after all, wouldn’t the homeless enjoy the better weather in Florida?

Instead of dealing with our Country’s illegal immigrant problem, we are bussing them all over the country.  Texas is bussing them to Denver and Denver turns around and buses them to Salt Lake City.  Like dangerous dogs, no one wants them, so they are just passed to the next unsuspecting jurisdiction.

I feel bad that our profession played a hand in causing this mentality of not taking care of our own problems.

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Worrying

Three dogs were attacking people in a Roy Utah park.   The three dogs were a Border Collie mix, a Lab mix, and an Aussie mix.  In rural communities, dogs are not generally killed for attacking people, but most rural communities have laws that allow dogs to be killed for “worrying” livestock.

Utah Code 18.3 states, “Any person may injure or kill a dog while: 1) the dog is attacking, chasing, or worrying: a) a domestic animal having commercial value, b) a service animal, or c) any species of hoofed protective wildlife.”

So these three dogs didn’t risk being shot until the dogs moved on from attacking people to “worrying” a neighboring horse.  Don’t get excited, none of the dogs were killed, but one dog was shot with a bean bag round.  All three dogs were captured, with the help of the dog’s owner.  But the notion of shooting the dogs only rises to the occasion of the dogs chasing a horse.

I find these rural animal control codes interesting in that we overlook the actions of dogs biting people and concern ourselves with what is going on in the minds of a herd of cattle.  It isn’t as if you can get a written statement from a cow before you shoot the dog that has entered the cow’s domain.  I think the intent of this law is to catch a dog in the commission of engaging in an attack on cattle, but it goes on to include much more.

If a rancher decided to shoot a dog that was found in the pasture of his (or her) cows, no proof of an attack would be needed because worrying a cow is not a physical action.  Even a dog wanting to play with a cow would likely cause the cow to worry.

I’ve experienced plenty of dogs rushing at me in which I could not determine the dog’s body language to know the dog’s intent.  I have had more than my share of worrying.  This is one of the biggest problems with dog owners: not considering the mindset of the people around them.  They give no thought to people being worried about their dog’s unruly behavior.  It isn’t until the dog bites someone that the dog’s owner is pulled out of his or her stupidity.

 

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Two Types of Volunteers to Avoid

Every group of volunteers has two types you should avoid: Karens and Barbaras.   Karens are the ones who demand that you do everything their way and Barbaras are the ones that want to take credit for everything that you do.

It is easy to get frustrated with these volunteers, but once you see them as who they are, it is much easier to deal with them.

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Dog Bite Prevention

6,000 Letter Carriers are bitten by dogs each year.  Why?  Because dogs feel like they are invincible against the Carriers.  Every day a Carrier comes to their door to deliver mail, the dog barks at the Carrier, and the Carrier leaves.  In the dog’s mind, the dog believes that his (or her) barking has frightened away an intruder.  Day after day, the dog is further convinced of being invincible and their aggression increases with each return of that intruder who is taunting the dog.  In the dog’s mind, that intruder is begging to be bitten.

Receiving mail is an important part of our everyday lives.  Dog owners who want to continue receiving their mail should take a critical look at their dog’s behavior to determine if their dog presents a risk to their Letter Carrier.

As an animal control professional, I saw that when the USPS stopped mail delivery it was the most effective way to control loose dogs in a neighborhood.  In recent years, Letter Carriers have been encouraged to sue dog owners when they are bitten.  Lawsuits are an effective way to educate people.

The best prevention is to separate the dog from the carrier.  It’s pretty darn simple.  Lawsuits are simply an effective way to end stupidity.