Animal Control to the Rescue

While sitting on the front porch, drinking my morning coffee, I remembered about the injured squirrel from last week’s Injury in the ‘Hood post.  I stood at the bottom of his tree, looking up to see if I could find him crouching on a branch.  He wasn’t on the lowest branches and I couldn’t spot a nest farther up.  I was hopeful that perhaps he just had a slipped disc, it righted itself overnight, and he was sleeping off the pain on a top branch.

Then at my feet I heard rustling in the daylilies.  I screamed like a girl and ran. I casually looked down and noticed the squirrel, still injured.  Apparently he’d fallen into the dayliles.  I ran to  get my camera call the city’s Animal Control Resident Services because this would make a good sequel to Injury in the ‘Hood every life matters and doing the right thing by this animal just after I see who’s beeping in on call waiting immediately, was my top priority.

Upper Wonderful’s legendary Animal Control officer arrived shortly thereafter.  When she got out of her vehicle, I ran out to greet her.  I wanted to make sure all the neighbors knew she wasn’t making a visit to my house about that dog that sometimes wanders the neighborhood or gets walked off leash.  That dog being my dog, hence my fine to pay.

Last week, if you told me the Animal Control van would be in front of my house this week, I would definitely have believed you.  But if you said it was not because my neighbor-who-doesn’t-like-dogs narced on me, but because I wanted to save the life a pesky rodent that digs up my tulips, I would not have believed you.

Further, if you told me Animal Control doesn’t just take the rodent behind the police barracks and shoot it, but gingerly transports it to a the Ohio Wildlife Center where good money and time are spent on “enrichment” exercises to stimulate the animal, and return it to its habitat, I definitely would have thought you were smoking something.

She carefully crated the animal, resting him on 800-count Egyptian cotton sheets, and secured him in her air conditioned limo, where I see a large Shepherd mix in the passenger seat, wearing a leash with a harness around his snout.  I wonder if they use this type of leash when they capture friendly little dogs, say about 17 pounds, that come to “Maggie” or “biscuit” or “stay” or “sit”?

I wonder if capturing someone’s pet running loose in the groomed and sterile streets of Upper Wonderful was what detained her from arriving within seconds of the injured squirrel 911 I dialed in.  She explains that he’s her dog:  “I’m bringing him to Safety Town today to teach the kids about dog safety.”  Safety Town is a two-week summer preschool program that is designed to put the fear of accidents happening at any moment in the hearts of young children, to prepare them. When they outgrow their Garanimals they can take the abduction safety and self-defense class.

“Do you ever bring him to the dog park?”  I’m trying to make conversation from one dog owner to the next, develop a bond for the day Officer Animal Control gets a call from my neighbor.  This will come in handy for when she decides that since we’re BFFs she’ll cut me some slack, maybe not fine me the first few times she gets a call about my dog being off leash.  Maybe she has already gotten a call.  Maybe she lets the first infraction slide, a little  “accident forgiveness.”

“No,” she says firmly, “I never let my dog off leash.”  She says this the way vegans say, “I never eat anything with a face.”  That was awkward.  As if I just sank my chops into a medium rare burger and juice is dripping down my chin.  I wipe my chin.

Later in the day I find myself thinking about the squirrel.  I say to Vincent, “I keep thinking about that squirrel.  I wonder if he’s in squirrel heaven, looking down on us.”

“Mom?”

“Yea?”  I’m expecting a conversation to ensue about animal afterlife.  I’m preparing my speech.

“You’re creepy.”

“I know.  And I have a morbid curiosity.”

The  Ohio Wildlife Center has a hotline. I call it to check on the squirrel’s prognosis.  While I admit I had hopes that the squirrel was going to be rehabilitated, I was mostly interested in finding out what their procedure was for returning a rehabilitated animal to nature.  Would a van covered in “PETA” and “Don’t Feed the Geese” bumper stickers pull in front of my house and return the squirrel to the base of the oak tree?

I was imagining they are purists and would return the creature to our neighborhood.  We’d  identify him by a limp in his gait.  I played the movie in my head:  standing at the kitchen window, washing out recycling containers and spotting “our squirrel” that the kids named.  I could yell, Hey, kids!  Gimpy is back!  Look!  He’s eating the almonds you put out for him!  They would come running and I’d feel motherpride coarsing through my veins like crack.  Born Free is the background music.

Abruptly, the plug gets pulled on my movie, cutting off the song just after “…as free as the wind blows…” when the wildlife center volunteer gives me the report on Gimpy.

WILDLIFE CENTER VOLUNTEER:  “Um…It looks like Miss B brought it in at 11:45 am and it was euthanized.”

ME:  There go the almonds….the rescue stories…the family photos with Gimpy sitting on my kid’s shoulder…the theme song… “Oh…..really?”

When she hears my disappointment she shifts into gentle-comforting-words-lady.  It is clear she has done this before.  In a previous life she was a funeral director.

WILDLIFE CENTER VOLUNTEER:  “Um…if it has a spinal injury that was not able to be rehabbed or if it’s in extreme pain…we use the same solution that veterinarians would use.   It’s called euthasol and it’s an overdose of anesthesia.”  Her voice gets quiet and crackly at the end and I like the effect.  It sounds like she would cry with me if I began blubbering.

ME:  “Oh.  Well.  Yea.  That’s good.  I didn’t want him to suffer.  Um…Thank you…Bye.”

I’m a little sad that I didn’t see any mention of the squirrel’s passing on the news ticker.  But it’s not like he was a legend, a hairstyle trendsetter for an entire generation.  God knows he couldn’t dance, what with his paralysis.  Still.  It’s a shame his life was cut so short.

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