Animal Control dispatcher-very weak rant

The BBQ Pit
1

I finally got a trap set today by Animal Control, with the goal of capturing some of the feral cats around my house. I’ve been feeding them, and putting out water, and now have a huge load of guilt because at the end of May I ran over two kittens.

Okay, after going to the store for a can of cheap tuna I baited the trap and within minutes I had a cat. This was at 5:15 and I had been told I could call the AC until 8:00. So I called and the dispatcher said, well, the following is a letter to the editor of our newspaper that I am going to be mailing.

  • Dear Editor:

Because I am a soft-hearted idiot I have given food and water to the feral cats in my neighborhood. However, following a recent tragedy in which I ran over two young kittens with my car I resolved to call Animal Control, to arrange for a trap to be brought to my house, to catch some of the cats. After a wait of a little over a month(the number of traps is limited) an Animal Control officer brought a trap to my house and placed it, on Thursday, July 3rd.

Late that afternoon a cat was caught, and, as instructed, I called the dispatch number. It was about 5:15 PM, and I had been told I could call until 8:00 PM. The woman on the phone said they might not be able to pick it up that day. As the next day was a holiday I asked how I could get water to the cat, as it was so hot outside. The dispatcher claimed she had never even seen one of the traps, and had no idea on what to do. When I expressed concern for the cat she got snippy with me, and said they had only one officer and were really backed up. So I left my phone number and hoped that I would get a call from the officer herself before 8:00 PM that evening. No call was forthcoming.

Look, I understand that working for Animal Control is a tough job. But that is no reason for the dispatcher to act upset with ME when I ask a simple question. I had no intention of letting that cat go without water for over thirty-six hours, so I examined the trap and finally figured out how to get it open. Of course, when putting the water in there, the cat got away, but I also figured out how to reset the trap, and as of this writing I have it baited again and waiting.

Perhaps what Topeka needs to do is increase the budget for the Animal Control. That way there would be more assets, so that when a citizen is simply following the instructions they have been given, they aren’t treated as if they are being unreasonable.*

How does that sound? I didn’t want to sound too hateful towards the dispatcher.

I hope I can catch another cat, because I already have water in the front of the trap, with food at the back past the trap spring.

2

Your letter does seem to focus on the dispatcher a bit too much. Especially considering you don’t want to sound hateful towards the dispatcher. Sounds as though the dispatcher could use more training, and that too will take more funds.

I do appreciate the kindness you are extending to these poor cats.

I had an experience with a stray who had a litter of kittens in my garage. I took Mom and the kittens in, and got them all fed up and old enough to give out to new homes.

I tried and tried to get the mom kitty to fit into my household but she was just too wild. I finally took her to the humane society. I was extremely unhappy to do this, and the worker there made it even worse for me. She made ME take the cat back into the pound area and put her in the cage myself. Her reason… “I don’t do cats”

How can you work at the humane society and be afraid of cats?

Anyway, I feel for you.

3

A) Cats are pretty smart. If the trap was a bad experience for her, she’ll have to be pretty hungry before you can catch her again.

B) Anyone else distribute or lend traps? In many areas you can “check out” a trap and then return it, comlete with animal to the county, city or SPCA in your area.

4

Now that the cat is familiar with your ploy, you may wish to alter the appearance of the trap. Drape an old blanket over it to change how it looks. Switch to another form of bait. Some canned salmon should be rather smelly and irresistible.

Baker, you are doing everything right. As to the letter, I’d simply hold off on sending the thing. Animal control is an incredibly unrewarding job. If you really want to change things, talk to the dispatch supervisor and let them know that their employee’s attitude is off-putting. Mention this only in respect to how important it is the have the community on board with their efforts.

If you have the same experience with that dispatcher on another occasion, go ahead and send in the letter. I’m sure that a quick email to alohaaloha will confirm what I’m saying about the general lack of funding and staffing in most animal control departments. If you want to make a big difference in things, approach some of the live trap manufacturers like Havaheart and others about donating to your local shelter.

Again, you are to be commended for trying to save these animals. I’m also hoping that you will immediately cut yourself some slack about the kittens that you accidentally ran over. It most certainly was not your fault. Whoever abandoned the mother cat in the first place was the one who doomed the kittens. Please forgive yourself at once as your are not the one to blame. You are a kind and sweet person, give yourself a little credit where credit is due.

5

baker

I feel your pain!

Yes, the Animal Control staff who set the trap said you could call up until 8:00 p.m. But did they say they would pick it up that night if you called? I suspect not…one of those “communications” issues.

As you know, this is my business. May I offer an alternative before sending the letter to the Editor and alienating the Animal Control staff in which case you may never get the type of treatment and response you deserve?

Since the Animal Control staff in Topeka fall under the jurisdiction of the Police Department, call the PD staff person in charge of Animal Control on Monday morning. Explain the situation to him/her and tell them there are some “training opportunities” available by their own staff that would probably improve their service overall. If you do not get anywhere with this person, send the letter to them with a copy to the Chief of Police.

The following is from the City of Topeka Website:

"Animal Control Officers are on duty from 6 AM until 8:30 PM during the summer months…

Animals which are picked up by Animal Control Officers are generally taken to the Helping Hands Humane Society Shelter, 2625 NW Rochester Road."

Perhaps what the dispatcher should have suggested was for you to take the trap with the cat inside to the Animal Shelter (like j.c. suggested). Call the Humane Society Saturday morning to find out their “drop off” hours, in case Animal Control cannot come over the weekend, too.

indecisive1 is correct that the dispatcher is the “heavy” in this case. This is a training issue. When you talk with PD, perhaps you can suggest that their “call-takers/dispatchers” should:

  1. Be familiar with the equipment used by the officers in the field to be able to perform a higher level of customer service to the residents and answer their questions; and

  2. Do a “ride-a-long” with the officers so that they will know what the officers actually do. Believe me, this type of training has improved customer service in more than one agency in the U.S.

I am so glad you wrote the letter but didn’t send it yet, as it sure helps to get it off your chest! I do the same thing…

Good luck with your trapping and let me know if I can help.

AlohaAloha

P.S. July 3-5 is our busiest time. Animals get frightened from fireworks and our officers are running themselves ragged to keep up with the injured animal calls as well as normally docile dogs turned agressive because of the fireworks. I had to settle the two dogs I am caring for as well as the dog behind me–my asshole neighbor left his 11 month old German Shepherd alone and the family is gone until Sunday. Thank goodness all is quiet now…

6

Looks like Zenster and I were writing at the same time!

And yes, baker, you ARE a kind and sweet person.

7

Thank you for the responses. I will hold off on sending the letter. I spent last night at my folks house, and am now going to call the dispatch number and see if they are picking up animals today, Saturday. If they wre I am going to set the trap, and do as Zenster said, alter it’s appearance. I also managed to get a little bowl of water inside already, so if the animal has to wait it can at least drink. I’ll let you know what happens, if I catch anything, or if I get a chance to talk to a dispatch supervisor.

8

Here’s a few comments, from a former dispatcher.

Is the dispatcher animal control only? I tend to doubt it, unless you’re in a mighty big city. Where I worked, animal control calls, regular police calls, and 911 calls were all handled by the same people. It’s a stressful job, and people did tend to be a bit snippy with citizens who called in.

Chances are, if this is the case, they probably know next to nothing about animal control. Hell, I didn’t. My training was all about how to tell people how to use CPR over the phone, and how to handle hysterical callers, and whatnot. These dispatchers are anxious to get off the phone. Keep in mind, if you’re in a small town, there might only be one dispatcher! (For me, we had one center serving three towns in a metro area, with 12 911 lines, 6 regular police lines, and 3 dispatchers at a time for all three cities - not to mention handling all radio traffic with maybe 20 officers!). They are trained to log a call, send out an officer when they’re available, and then get off the phone. They’re not the same as customer service - they can’t put people on hold.

The attitude does seem to be kind of poor as dispatchers - but, I’d recommend to have some sympathy for them. Sure, they could be thinking “Why won’t this idiot leave me alone so I can go play some more Minesweeper”, but it’s just as likely they’re thinking “Why won’t this person let me off the phone so it’s easier for me to answer the fifty billion questions this officer is asking me about this burglary he’s currently working and so I could start answering the five other ringing phone lines since the other dispatchers are all on urgent medical calls!” They may have just gotten done with something particularly taxing, like a police chase, a frantic relative of a person in dire medical need, or a child sexual abuse case. (Lest you think the odds are not good in your area for these sorts of crimes, keep in mind I worked in a relatively low crime place and dealt with all three of these things in the three-month period I worked at this job.)

Sadly, animal control doesn’t rate all that high on the radar of most police dispatch centers. They’re overworked, tired as heck, trying to full high citizen expectations in a job with very little thanks and rewards. They’re often trying to preserve human lives and the lives of feral cats isn’t as critical. This is probably why they appear to be a bit short on sympathy - it’s hard to get worked up for stray cats without water when you’ve listened to people on the phone who are dying or being attacked.

Now, on the other hand, my center was pretty bad and it was taken as normal to be snippy with pretty much anyone who called. I hated that and I hated the job in general, I hated the attitude of people who worked there, and I wish it would have changed. I understand some degree of it, but it may not simply be stress and pressure on time, it may be a culture of apathy at that place, or a bad dispatcher, and that IS something that can and should be changed.

Just my two (or more) cents on the issue.

9

fluiddruid, from 8:00AM to 8:00PM it is Animal Control only. After that time a police dispatcher takes calls for them.

I was glad to hear your comments. It’s interesting to know just what can go on.

The AC officers I have dealt with in the past have all been professional, courteous, and sympathetic, and most of the time their response time is admirable. I once called about a bitch and her puppies that had no shelter in a violent storm, and they came within an hour of my complaint, and cited the jerk owner, who was angry and didn’t think they’d done anything wrong, “because animals don’t feel pain like people do!” I once saw the director of our local humane society remain calm when a loser of an owner threatened to abandon his dog and her puppies unless the shelter took them immediately. Policy at the time was that an animal had to be advertised for three days in the “Free” column of the want ads before being dropped off. The director did end up taking the dogs in, even though she wanted to rip the guy’s face off.

Folks like you, those in Animal Control, and shelter workers have one of the hardest jobs in the world. But that was still not an excuse for the one dispatcher to speak to me as she did.

I have however now completely given up on sending the letter, and have even deleted it from my files. If I catch a cat I am going to call to have it picked up, and after seeing how I’m spoken to then I will make a decision on whether or not to pursue the matter further. Everyone can have a bad day, I should probably cut the gal some slack.

10

Baker, I just wanted to add how terrible I would feel too had I accidentally ran over those kittens. You are understandably regretful about this just as I would be. I’m hoping that you will permit the online community here to serve its function and reassure you that you must not punish yourself over this for another moment.

If you chose to do nothing about this after the accident, then you might be obliged to have a twinge of conscience about it. Quite the opposite is true, you are actively working to prevent this from ever happening again. If there is one single legacy this sad event should have it is precisely what you have set about to do. Please take a moment to reflect upon your right conduct and merciful intentions. They are a credit to your reputation and character.

11

What a sad story, and thanks for trying to help, Baker – do you have an alternative to Animal Control in Topeka? There are numerous “no-kill” shelters in my area (although they are usually at maximum capacity). We are lucky enough to live in a suburb of Dallas where the Animal Control center is much more like a SPCA - we’ve taken stray animals there, and adopted a fine black Persian feline from them as well.
I don’t know a lot about traps - my sister, however, is a vigilante on the subject, and caught a ferrel kitten six weeks ago - he’s dancing around my house as we speak.
Good luck to you. And I am so sorry to hear of your experience with running over the kittens - I’ve gone through that pain once. Dying cat, who had already been hit; my ex ran over it as we were driving home one night - we cried for hours. I just wish we could find a way to neuter/spay the strays! It breaks my heart.

12

Blonde, there is a wonderful no-kill cat shelter here in Topeka, but it is indeed at capacity, even though it just recently moved into larger quarters. One can read about them at http://geocities.com/topekacat/

Our human shelter is good too, at www.topekahumaneshelter.org/

I’m not really beating myself any more about the kittens. I resolved to try and make sure it doesn’t happen again, by trying to trap the cats. I actually was about to go out and rebait the cage, as the sun has passed far enough to the west that the cage(on the east of my house) is in shadow again. So if I did catch a cat it would be more comfortable until it was picked up by the AC.

13

That’s humane shelter!:smack:

14

Baker, don’t worry. With so many people abandoning their household pets into the wild, there’s plenty of humans that need to be put down as well. At the very least, they should be caged for a while.

15

Don’t get me started on that subject, Zenster - I have seen dogs wandering around lakes who didn’t have that feral look (chow/shepherd), so obviously they were just dumped. As for the wild ones - I haven’t been able to shake off seeing a dog attempt to cross a major highway a few months ago. He didn’t make it.

16

It’s been over thirty years ago, but my younger sister and I once witnessed a dog being abandoned at a busy intersection. In Kansas in January. Very cold. We didn’t get the license plate number, but we did pick the dog up, it looked like a peekapoo or lhasa mix. Obviously an old dog. We took it home for the night and took it to the family vet the next day. It had bad teeth, bad eyes, and congested lungs and heart. And as the vet told us, even if all that was cleared up, it was still an old dog. He put it to sleep for us, and didn’t charge.

And you want to know the really sad part? As the car that put it out drove away, my sister and I both saw a child’s little face pressed to the back window, watching as the car moved on.

17

I stand upon my last post.

18

I second it, Zenster.

OTOH, Wife has spent only a couple days at her job at the wildlife refuge and already is full of cheerful tales of idiotic humans, like the ones who brought in a bucket of “baby squirrels.”

“Uh, ma’am, those are baby mice.”

“Maybe we should clean out our back yard.”

Or the one who brought in a young opossum that had been living on hot dogs for the past week, I suspect because his farts had gotten too bad. I can only guess the stories he’ll tell his friends when he is released, “There was this house where I could eat all the hot dogs I wanted!” They won’t believe him.

It seemed convenient at the time but the night before she started one of our daughters found a baby bird that had fallen from its nest. The nest was too high for me to put it back in so we packed it up the next day and brought it to the shelter.

“Sorry, that’s a starling. Non-native species. We can’t take it.”

So, now I’m raising a starling. I’ll bet the folks down south’ll be right appreciative that I’m saving one of those winged rats, but I’m a good daddy and it WUBS! me. Wife says "There must not be much to being a starling because you can hand raise one and even teach it to talk and then let it go and it’ll do fine. One scared the shit out of me when I was in the woods and it came over and said, “Who’s the pretty bird?” And, as it is a non-native songbird (AKA: vermin), I can keep it with no fear of arrest.

19

People never cease to amaze me. Last week I awoke to find my Australian Cattle Dog sniffing around a box that was placed over my front fence. I opened it to find there were three kittens inside. I took them to my vet that morning for a check up and found out they were only four or five weeks old. Through a lady in my street, I found out who the owners were. They got the shock of their lives when I knocked on their door to ask them about the kittens they abandoned in my yard. I found out they have two females cats who have both had litters…and these kittnes were from their second litters. I’ve since payed to get their cats desexed and I decided to keep the kittens, which I’ve called Mawson (after Australian geologist and Antarctic explorer, Douglas Mawson), Yeager (after pilot, Chuck Yeager) and Betty (after no one in particular…she just looks like a Betty). :slight_smile:
Baker, your heart’s in the right place. You can only do your best, so good luck.

20

It’s too late now, but in case you’re stuck with this problem again, maybe a water bottle would work? Like one of the big ones used for rabbits. It’ll set you back a few bucks but it’s something to keep in mind just in case.