Dogcatcher

What I remember most was the dogcatcher keeping his distance from me and the black German shepherd.

He hadn’t been able to catch her.

I had. I’d laid my bare hands on her neck, searched for the thin collar deep in thick fur, hooked my fingers under it, held her safe from the traffic. I’d done it without thinking.

~

Half an hour earlier, I’d been jogging the riverfront bike path next to the three one-way lanes of Front Street, which heads toward downtown Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. It’s an urban park with gardens, benches, and exercise stations. The wide and old Susquehanna River borders the park on the other side, with steep and weedy banks. From my house to Division Street and back is about a two-mile jog.

A city maintenance truck was blocking the path, and I was thinking of using it as an excuse to turn back. It was June and already humid enough to kill my will to move. But then I realized it was the truck of the city’s animal control officer. The dogcatcher! I jogged faster. I spotted him a ways down the path, in his dirty brown uniform, which made him look like a tall cowbird with a curly gray hair. If I had to guess his age I’d say 70. A few feet behind him was a woman wearing turquoise scrubs. A nurse. Both had their backs to me. He held his arm out toward her. Stop. Stay. She ignored him. Ahead on the bike path was the loose shepherd, raven-black and panting, eyes wide and tongue long. Her trot was a shade shy of run.

I did not blame her, given who was nearest. The dogcatcher in Harrisburg is notorious, like every dogcatcher villain in the movies. It’s why I use the derogatory “dogcatcher” for him. Since 1985 he’s been the main holder of a thankless job in a struggling city. He’s been hardened and then some by the frontlines of dogfighting rings and the orbits of chronic neglect around that culture. The result is he doesn’t think much of people—any people—and he’s cantankerous. Once I called him to my house to see what was going on with the neighbor’s dogs, a pair of female pit bulls kept on an upstairs porch without proper anything. He glanced at their situation from afar and said well what do you want me to do about it. I was taken aback by his unprofessional tone, his attitude suggesting that he had no authority, his ingrained lack of compassion. I told him to get over there and talk to the owners of the dogs, which he did. He cited them for no licenses. But the dogs stayed, albeit in the backyard instead of on the upstairs porch. Eventually they escaped out the shoddy side gate and neighbors called a pit bull rescue, who took the girls within a day. Later I learned that many people in the city knew to skip calling the dogcatcher and contacted volunteer rescues instead.

The staff at the animal shelter where I volunteer don’t like him either, and he’s at their doors weekly. I imagine they draw straws to see who has to talk to him. The shelter and the city contract with each other, since it’s not a city-owned shelter. The deal is something like this: The dogcatcher gets to drop off 100 dogs a year, about two a week. Once he hits that limit, the shelter won’t take strays caught in the city until the city renegotiates the contract. The renegotiation always happens, but it’s government so it’s slow. The dogcatcher is difficult; he’s not a negotiator. One year when he reached that limit, he ranted and raved outside the shelter, calling the staff killers for not accepting the injured stray in his truck. It made headlines, as the shelter staff said they were afraid of him, and he maintained that the director of the shelter was a murderer. Many of the staff there are young women. When I’ve asked them about the dogcatcher, the response is uniform: an eye roll, a long sigh, he’s quite a character or yeah, he’s a, um, interesting guy.

Here’s the final kink in the leash: the dogcatcher was neglectful of his own horses’ barn in the city, where since 1975 he ran a carriage business until it was shut down in 2016 for code violations; holes in the roof, floor drains blocked, pipes broken, and owing rent around $6000. The city had to force the dogcatcher to relocate his horses to better facilities and pay his rent. And yet he keeps the job. There is a good chance no one else wants to do it.

When I sense that the shepherd is willing to run across three lanes of traffic rather than be caught by this guy, I decide to help. I’ve been volunteering at the shelter for over a year now; I like to think I have certain skills with animal behavior.

My plan is to end-run the dog and box her in—me heading her off from the north, dogcatcher and nurse at the south, river on the west, traffic on the east. I cross Front Street and sprint a few blocks until I’m far ahead. I played three years of college soccer (with a team whose name strikes me as deeply ironic as I run down a dog—The Hiram College Terriers) and can sometimes still find my speed, although it leaves me gasping and weak-kneed in a minute. I cross back to the bike path and there she is, trotting toward me. She halts by a park bench, unsure. She’s a lanky lady with one haunch hung in mud and burrs. She’s slept in strange places.

The dogcatcher retreats to his truck, which he can’t leave too far behind, and the nurse is still approaching. The nurse yells that the dog will sit on command. It’s not her dog but she’s been trying to catch it on her break. She tells the dog to sit and it does. For a moment. But our nemesis and his truck are grumbling up the bike path, and the dog wants none of that. She gets to her feet, unsteady, exhausted, and eyes a route across the street. We’re at a wide and complicated intersection with a small traffic island planted with yellow lilies and plumes of ornamental grass. I get the feeling the dog is certain she must head for cover.

Animal movement is a thing to study. My cousin, who taught me to ride horses, used to make me ride with my eyes closed and tell her which front leg was forward. I was young and it was the hardest thing to do. I guess it took thinking, patience, the test of feeling movement, not seeing it. In college I worked on an organic farm and got asked once to catch chickens by their legs, swing them upside down, and tuck them safely into a crate. It took anticipation, speed, a firm but tender grip. With dogs, you can watch their eyes, ears, a leg lifted, a tail high or low. Or, like with horses, you can spread your arms wide and stand your ground, appear bigger, claim the space and direct them with your energy as much as you’d guide them with a leash. Or, hunch your shoulders and collapse your chest to make yourself small. No talk, no eye contact. That’s one way to get close to a dog. I’ve read that some people can see more subtle muscle movements than others—champion goalkeepers can do this, can anticipate a kick right or left. The best animal trainers learn to see it. I’m nowhere near that, but I watch animals a lot. I’ve caught a few in my day.

I know this girl’s going to dart across the street. And so I spot a break in the traffic and step out, arms wide. I halt three lanes of city traffic like they are runaway horses. The dog takes her chance and darts for the traffic island, where she stops. Now she’s boxed in by halted cars, high lilies and spiky grass, the nurse coming up behind, and me from the front. I keep my eyes down and I don’t speak. I walk right up to her, take her by the nape of her big neck and feel a thin collar deep in her fur. She twists her shoulder down to the ground, submissive, mouth wide. She is so hot, so thirsty, so out of options. She lies down on her side. The nurse kneels and helps me hold her, and now two men checking a utility pole come over, easily keeping the traffic at a stop with their official fluorescent vests. We all stare at the dog. Then speaking at once we tell her she’s a good girl, what a pretty girl, we’ve got her, she’s safe, she’s going to be OK.

The dogcatcher sits in his truck on the bike path. He’s glaring.

The nurse yells to him to bring a leash. She’s my favorite person in the world. She and I will be humane and wise dogcatching girls forever and ever. And that’s when the dogcatcher in his truck yells back to us, “No, you bring her to me.”

I think for a moment that the nurse is going to kill him, she’s so angry. She stomps across the lanes, gets a cheap nylon slip lead from him, runs back (time matters, she knows this), and loops it on the dog. We get her to her feet. I hold the collar, the nurse takes the lead, the utility workers follow with their arms out to keep the traffic stopped. We are a compassionate entourage and the dogcatcher hates us.

His truck has six cages. All are empty and one is open and waiting. He lifts the huge shepherd in a single practiced grip and tosses her into the cage—I hope it’s a movement he’s learned not so much from cruelty or disrespect, but from not wanting to get bitten. Even so, I’m at the proverbial end of my rope with him. He closes the metal wire door and grabs a long silver pole with a hook at the end. He rams it through the door—the dog, terrified, flattens herself against the back wall and suddenly I regret bringing her to him. I should have lied and said she was my dog, that I was out jogging to look for her. He hooks the cheap slip lead, loosens it like an expert, slips it off her head, pulls it out through the door. “Why not keep it on?” asks the nurse. Her arms are crossed. I hope she’s my nurse someday. So much effort to get the leash on the dog and now he’s taken it off. We are all silent but thinking, why did you have to do that like that.

The dogcatcher turns to us like a schoolmaster plotting discipline on the blackboard and we’re the terrible disruptive students who have just ruined his lecture. He’s tall, unshaven, skin like tanned leather, smudged glasses. In the movie version of this he’s played by Christopher Lloyd or Bruce Dern. He says, “You leave that leash on and it might trail out the door once we get moving and get wrapped around an axle and choke the dog, you won’t even know what’s happening up front in the cab until it’s too late.” He lets that sink in. I don’t know what the nurse is thinking, but I’m thinking, my god, he’s made the mistake before.

“You know,” he adds, while he has our horrified attention, “you ladies should not have done what you did. You could have been bit, and then I’d have to file a bite report and that dog would be put down like all bite cases, it would have been out of my control.” He’s a government employee, this is policy, I know. There’s an upset edge to his voice under the anger, and I realize he admires the black shepherd and would never want to file a bite report on her, but his job would force him too, especially if private citizens were bit. I of course did not think this through when reaching for the dog. I did not think that he was glaring at us not out of jealously, but out of concern for the dog’s safe return to an owner. He is of course a humane person, a lover of animals. Still, this is a guy who has not said “thank you” in a long time. Overt gratitude might not be part of his world. And I notice he’s lecturing the women but not the utility men.

He goes on. What people think is helpful isn’t, and he’s the authority here, he knows these dogs, he would have caught her eventually without us. Citizens, he says again, should not help. Women, he says, are just liked by some dogs better than men, he doesn’t know why. “That’s the only reason why she let you get close,” he adds. I don’t talk back to him because I realize he’s defensive about his failure and a defensive person will snap just like a defensive dog. I’ve been in that corner. There’s a real possibility he can’t even move fast enough to catch dogs these days. I know he knows he could not do what I just did, be sprinting around like a sprite, stopping traffic like Wonder Woman, leaping from the pages of how many children’s books where the kind girl woos the animals? The hero is never a dogcatcher.

The nurse is also skilled at moving beyond this gender nonsense and petty insult and is peppering him with questions about what will happen next with the dog, but I already know, since I volunteer at the shelter where she’s headed. So I lean against the truck and whisper to her that maybe I’ll see her soon and we’ll go for a proper walk in a safe place after she gets a meal, a bath, some fresh water. She’s a captivating dog, a little black wolf.

The moment I’m back home, I call my supervisor at the shelter. If no owner comes forward for the dog, I’m interested in her, as “the finder.” That’s a certain status in stray dog world—the phrase “finder interested” on a stray’s paperwork means that someone who cared enough to secure the dog also called dibs on the dog but is doing the ethical thing by surrendering the dog to the shelter so an owner can locate it. Finders get priority, right below owners, of course. Finders are maybe heroes, the dog maybe a reward. My supervisor says OK, she’ll watch for the dog and make sure she gets water right away. Then she says thank you. We say and mean so many thank-you’s in the shelter world.

It turns out, however, that the dog is microchipped, and the relieved owner comes forward within hours. The black shepherd’s been on the lam, has a picture up on the lost dog sites on social media. There have been multiple sightings, with no one able to catch her until I did.

I realize the dogcatcher will get credit for the save, that the dog’s owner might tell him thank you when he deserves none of that. I could go on the various social media sites and post about my key role in the safe rescue. I could control the narrative that way, grab it by that collar, demand the treat of a thank you for such Good Samaritan action.

Or I could let it go (now that I have it) and see if it shepherds me on my next jog around town, the karma of a save. Maybe that’s my government policy, my animal control. The poet Eileen Myles, writing of her beloved pit bull Rosie, said, “My dog reached out. Often Rosie would reach out a paw and place it on my arm. I know.” And because I reached out, I know that wild black fur, a strange palm on a strange animal’s neck, and yet all of this is familiar, the eyes saying OK, you can do this. You can, I know.