Morning Bowl o’ Chim Chim
There has been a lot going on. I have not quite had the motivation to write or read email or do much of anything really. Maybe I’ll blame it on the heat. At least we finally went swimming. For some absurd reason, we had not been swimming the past couple of summers. And that’s just crazy.
I had a run in yesterday with animal control. There were two wee loose dogs at work. Whoa, wait a minute, loose dogs in West Austin? That never happens. Someone actually made a joke that they came from East Austin because they heard life was better in West Austin. Anyway, several people were trying to catch the dogs with crates and leashes and chicken, but we were unsuccessful.
In the meantime, what I might call an overzealous security guard called animal control and said one bit him. They were feisty little suckers but really just unsocialized, unaltered, fearful little dogs. I truly doubt the guy got close enough to be bitten. Herein lies one of the problems with Austin. There just aren’t enough animal control officers and there is no sense of hurry to help unless you tell them the dog is dangerous or near a school. We experience this often when we call in East Austin. The usual answer is that animal control will come within 2 to 24 hours. Well, it’s not like a dog is going to stand around in the same spot for 24 hours.
So there were a couple of people willing to foster and maybe even adopt the dogs (not me! not me!), with of course, an effort made to locate the owner. Since we were having difficulty catching the dogs and animal control arrived, someone asked if they (animal control) caught the dogs, could we take them and foster them. The animal control officer, who was very unfriendly and made some pompous joke about people never being happy to see animal control, said they had to impound the dogs but we could put in an adoption application on them. We tried to explain that we knew that the chance of euthanasia was so high in Austin shelters that we did not want to take that chance. They said that they had to attempt to find the owner, so I asked about what I have done in the past when rescuing a dog – I email them the photos and they list the dog on their site and in a book at the shelter. The lady with the animal control dude said she was new and was not sure they could do that. Well, they can. I have done it several times now.
Long story short, animal control could not catch the dogs either. Is it bad that we were actually cheering the dogs on as they ran across the lawn with animal control chasing them? Probably. They ran away and have not been seen since the debacle. If you live in West Austin, please be on the lookout for a tan/white chihuahua mix and a tan wire-haired terrier type dog.
While I sort of understand that animal control has a job to do and they must do that job as they are told, I think Austin has a very bad animal system. We were three people fighting to help these little scared dogs and keep them out of “the system,” but animal control was unwilling to work with us at all. I knew that if they went to the shelter, even if we put in adoption applications on them to get them out… if they are deemed unadoptable during that three day hold time, we would not have been able to save them. And knowing that absolutely sucks.
Lesson learned: Next time I will lie and say that I am the owner of the dogs.
UPDATE: By the time I arrived at work this morning, the dogs were located and captured… by people and not by animal control. Hooray!
