Misbehavin'

It was a midmorning in August when the rooster went native in South Minneapolis. The city department of Animal Care and Control hastened an officer to the scene. The rooster, while inflicting no physical damage, had brazenly disregarded the matrix of propriety that binds people together and, more important, keeps them apart. An anonymous caller had described ruffled feathers and grave concerns: “Well, he has been eating at some of the neighborhood gardens,” she said. “But that is not really why I’m calling. I’m just concerned that he’ll get hit, or a dog will catch him.”
By the time the animal control officer arrived at Clinton Avenue South, the rogue fowl had disappeared. I was tagging along, riding with Badge 236, a twenty-year veteran of the department. We circled the neighborhood, glaring from the windows of the imposing blue-and-white truck, in pursuit of the fugitive.

As we rounded a corner, I spied something flashing in the middle of the road. The rooster stood defiant, his comb perfectly erect, his fantastic tail feathers fanning out in imitation of a bird of paradise. Even from the fifty-yard line, I could see that he was a magnificent bird.

We stopped the truck and got out. Badge 236 grabbed a tea towel and ran toward the rooster. He stood his ground on Third Avenue like a general in his labyrinth, oozing confidence and a remarkable-for-a-chicken sense of entitlement. As we approached, his small eyes locked with ours. Then he bolted.

Badge 236 launched into rapid pursuit up a small embankment, but the rooster, sensing its impending capture, trial, sentence, and possible stewing, made an Olympian leap over a chain-link fence, his clipped wings churning the air. Sheer force of will carried the beast to a second-floor windowsill, but gravity soon dragged him back to earth. In a final desperate move, the rooster dashed into a thick bush. Only his eyes belied his proud resignation as he cowered there; they glowed in yellow terror as Badge 236 make a quick grab and pulled him roughly into daylight.

Suddenly, the neighborhood was alive. A Somali man and his child stood stony-faced along the sidewalk, having watched the drama unfold. An elderly woman peered from her window. Two women in flowing dresses stood on their porch beaming. Nobody came forward to claim the rooster. Nobody seemed all that surprised that it was there. As Badge 236 bore the bird back to the truck, one of the women called out.

“Lemme see him,” she said.

Badge 236 obliged, and I watched in amazement as this two-pound paragon of a masculine scoundrel brought out something akin to desire in the women.

“He is a beautiful bird, ain’t he?”

“Yeah, he’s got a voice on him, too. He’s a big boy.”

One of them touched his comb. “Look at that comb, ain’t that something? So red.”

“He’s a stud,” the other woman winked.

“Any idea whose bird this might be?” Badge 236 asked.

The ladies gazed at each other. “I don’t know for sure, but I’m gonna guess he’s from down the street, there, at the end,” one said.

“You mean Lawrence?” asked the other, emphasizing the name in a way that suggested something sordid.

“Oh, yeah. Don’t you think a bird like that’s gonna be with Lawrence?”

The other woman laughed and turned her head, blushing.

I wasn’t exactly sure what intriguing business the women were referring to. But as Badge 236 carried the bird to the truck, I lingered in the street, assessing the assembled spectators and wondering about Lawrence. I thought about that old cliché—that the behavior of pets reflects the desires, fears, and, sometimes, male brazenness of their owners.

During the three days I rode with animal control, I witnessed an array of human dramas enacted by animal players. One woman called to say that her neighbor had been depositing dog feces in her garbage can, even though he knew perfectly well that she didn’t have a dog. Another filed a complaint about rogue cats soiling her meticulously tended garden. A man concerned about the decline of his neighborhood called in an injured rabbit, the victim of feral cats. “These new kids think it’s funny to feed the cats,” he noted with disgust. A harried man who had received a barking dog complaint asked if animal control would simply take his dog. “I have mental problems,” he said, “and I just can’t deal with it.”

Various employees of Animal Care and Control related their own “greatest hits.” There was the senile woman who repeatedly called about a swearing bird stuck in her radiator as a pretext for conversation, and the one who, following a nasty breakup with a Northwest Airlines pilot, suffered a strange infestation of bats and became convinced they were symbolic, or even imagined. “I think they’re trying to tell me, ‘enough of this hairy rat flying around my head,’” she explained. No fewer than five bats had been removed from her house, and still she called in, brokenhearted, to report others.

In fact, in the great diversity of stories told by street-weary and sometimes cynical animal control officers, there was only one constant: Urban animals may be unruly and screwed up, but humans are worse and often the cause of the trouble. As one driver put it, “The only animal that needs controlling is the human animal.”

If the world is a battleground, then pets occupy a crucial and twisted role at its center. Caught up in systems they cannot understand, let alone control, urban animals have become subconscious weapons in humanity’s desperate struggle against the dirty entropy of nature. Indeed, the domesticated animal assumes the burdens of our damaged civilization as surely as any human. Hitting a tree on your bike and getting bitten by a wanton dog both result in pain and suffering, but, because we can extract a price from the dog, we do. Dogs who go unrescued are euthanized on a weekly basis, the same fate suffered by the bats in the ex-girlfriend’s home. Feral cats and unclaimed roosters and abandoned fish are regularly carried out of animal control in body bags, having paid the ultimate price.

The animal control department’s new facility in north Minneapolis is an efficient processing center, with room for hundreds of animals. There are the familiar dog and cat rooms, open to the public six days a week, filled with heartbreaking little creatures begging for another shot at life. The death chamber waits just beyond. There is a room for pregnant and nursing cats, where the felines can’t see one another, lest the bloodlust of motherhood be piqued. There is the reptile and bird room, where turtles and iguanas wile away their final hours before being deported from Minneapolis (reptiles are illegal here). There is the fish room, whose empty tanks are mostly reserved for the pets of those who have been arrested, leaving their aquatic pets temporary wards of the state. There are quarantine areas for sick dogs and cats, and even a feral cat room, a terrifying place where animals utterly unlike the confident, affectionate creatures we know cower in dark corners, all woozy eyes and tattered fur and fleas. And then there is the bad dog room.

Bad dogs are to the animal control empire what Sparta was to Greece. They are animals stripped of the veneer of civilization, reduced to their primal states, and made mythic. Bad dogs confirm our worst fears, that behind the kind eyes of man’s best friend, who acknowledges the superiority of our species, there lurks a snarling, unreasonable creature whom ten thousand years of domesticity has brought no closer to spiritual solvency.

If the feral cat room is terrifying, the bad dog ward is a waking nightmare. As you walk the halls, dogs with clenched jaws cock their heads and stare out, their eyes filled with a mixture of fear, hate, and indifference. They react to us as befits the hopeless and doomed, with contempt and, perhaps rightly, blame.

Dogs bite people, regardless of their class, race, or prejudices. And animal control responds democratically. Thus, in a single day, I was exposed to both ends of the socioeconomic spectrum; the incidents revealed problems with individuals, neighborhoods, and, yes, the entire human race.

The first call came from the Jordan neighborhood in North Minneapolis. Badge 145 pulled the truck up in front of a stately house, coal-blue and graced by a massive porch filled with old bicycles, wooden swing sets, and assorted other remnants from several generations of extended family. The complainant was a robust woman of sixty-five; her grandson, who had been bitten by a dog, a heavy boy of eleven. She was concerned about rabies. The boy lifted his shirt to show two small holes above his chest. “I was just, uh, walking by the dog and he jump the fence and bit me,” he recounted, as Badge 145 took a digital photo of the wound. “I walk by that dog alla time, and he barkin’ and jumpin’ up, tryin’ to bite me.” Badge 145 asked the obvious: Why walk by a dog who wants to attack you? The grandmother concurred that the boy lacked judgment, and told Badge 145 that she had tried to talk to the dog’s owner, only to face a slammed door. The boy, meanwhile, confessed that he wished he had punched the dog in the nose.

“You probably shouldn’t do that to an angry dog,” I advised.

“If I’d had time to react, I’da tried to break his neck,” the boy said, adding with a pensive smile, “I’d like to wrestle with a baby bear.”

We walked to the house fingered by the grandmother. It was silent—no dog in sight—with all the shades drawn. A helpful sign in the window read, “Beware of Dog.” We rounded the back of the house, where a large Rottweiller and a smaller mutt paced behind a low fence. Badge 145, catchpole in hand, called out for an owner. She was preparing to take the Rottweiller when a bare-chested, bald man approached.

“Is this your dog?” she inquired.

“What the hell do you want?” the man asked.

“We have a report of a dog bite by this Rottweiller, and we need to make sure he is up to date on his vaccinations and take him in for observation.”

The man stared, and his large eyes boiled.

“My dog ain’t bit no one!” he yelled. The dogs barked in excitement. “Who the hell told you my dog bit him?”

“We received a call, and I am just doing my job,” Badge 145 said calmly.

Neighbors were rubbernecking from the end of the block, in accordance with the age-old tradition attendant to any regulatory incident. In an area of town all too used to human regulation, perhaps this incident offered a welcome change.

“My goddamn dog didn’t do shit!” the man yelled.

He turned to a young Asian man standing nearby. “Yo, some little asshole walkin’ around saying my dog bit someone. My dog didn’t do shit.”

Meanwhile, the Rottweiller had settled down and was trying to lick my hand through the fence. Badge 145 attempted to determine whether the dog had been licensed and inoculated. The man continued to yell as she filled out a report on her clipboard.

“My dog didn’t bite no one!”

As Badge 145 handed over the clipboard for the man’s signature, the smaller mutt made a snarling leap for her hand.

“That dog bites,” the man offered. “That dog’ll bitecha! But this dog, he don’t do shit.”

Five minutes later, the passive Rottweiller was caged in the back of the blue-and-white, headed for an uncertain future, while the scary mutt roamed its yard. “We have to go with what the boy says,” Badge 145 said.

Two hours later, we were called to the Tangletown neighborhood in South Minneapolis to investigate another bite. We pulled up in front of a large, impeccably maintained brick house with lots of flowers in the yard. A fleshy woman with limpid eyes waited at the door. She invited us into the living room, where still-life paintings of lilies and barns hung. In dramatic, hushed tones, she began her tale.

“I don’t really know where to start,” she started. “My neighbor’s dog bit me. You can see the bite here.” The woman held out her arm, where she had outlined the swelling wound with a black Sharpie.

“Has a doctor seen this?” Badge 145 asked.

“My husband is a physician,” she said, not quite answering. “And I’m a pharmacist. Anyway, I have to say, this was a really very difficult call for me to make.” She stopped for effect, then looked to us. “The thing is, this dog belongs to my next-door neighbor, but she really shouldn’t have a dog.”

She related an operatic tale involving the elderly neighbor, a neglected chow, a scared painter, and, at the center of it all, the woman’s own heroic self, just trying to help out and in the process getting bit by a dog.

“Why does this fall to you to do?” asked Badge 145. “Doesn’t she have any family around?”

“Well, she’s alienated most of them,” the victim said. “I really do hate to do this, you know. I mean, I may be the last friend she has.”

Finally, some twenty minutes after our arrival, we rang the neighbor’s doorbell. A woman, perhaps in her eighties, answered. She wore thick glasses, and was dressed only in a long T-shirt that read, “Virginia Is for Lovers.” She stood behind the door screen, looking both confused and haughty. As Badge 145 explained the lengthy impounding procedure, she leered at the house next door and chewed the air restlessly. When she finally spoke, she was furious.

“They don’t like my dog, you know,” she told me as Badge 145 went to get her catchpole. “She didn’t like my dog from the beginning. Because she’s a cat person, and cat people are a different breed of people entirely.”

From the kitchen, an alarming bark sounded, followed by the strong voice of Badge 145 trying to soothe the dog. The barks became louder and soon turned to snarls. Badge 145’s calming words became interspersed with low-level curses and grunts. There was a scuffle, and presently the black chow was brought out the door. The old lady stared, mute and angry.

“I hope they never set foot in my yard again, I’ll tell you that,” she said. I followed her line of vision to the neighbor’s windows, and glimpsed the pharmacist watching and then retreating into the murk.

And the beat goes on, as dogs, cats, and assorted other servants of our civilization daily fall in their ranks, a living tax against the costs of maintaining human dignity in the face of natural order. My journey with Animal Care and Control came to a prescient end when we were called to investigate a barking dog at the northernmost border of the city. The neighborhood streets were supremely flat, lined with tiny postwar houses and adolescent trees, and thick with the impression of openness and goodness.

A woman had claimed that a barking dog was driving her crazy. As per procedure, an animal control officer ventured out to make a ten-minute high-fidelity recording. We pulled into a tidy alley, stopped behind a shed, and killed the engine. Badge 246 pressed “record” on a taping device and motioned me to be silent as she placed it on the roof of the truck.

For ten marvelous minutes, I basked in the joyful symphony of the city—the hum of crickets, the songs of birds, the croaking of frogs—that plays under the cacophony of mankind. It was a haunting aural picture, revealing our lives to be only a network of demands laid ungracefully over nature. Yet one sound was conspicuously absent: the barking of dogs. And in the end, that was the only hope.


Posted

in

by

Tags:

Comments

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.