So there is a stray pack of little dogs in the neighborhood – definitely dumped from someone somewhere away from where anyone would see and on the streets for a few weeks. The kids next door take one of them, a filthy, famished, flea and lice riddled pekinese terrier and tie a rope loosely around its neck and tell me they have named it Mimi.
These kids are not eating, so I doubt Mimi is eating, but right away Mimi starts doing something. Mimi starts barking. The bark is a shrill rat-a-tat-tat that begins with mildest startle and continues a minimum of three or four minutes. Oh, and Mimi lives about eight feet from our bedroom window. The barking goes on at night, as the occasional passerby rattles the little dog and sets off the equivalent of a car alarm. When the sun rises, people on their way to work only serve to make Mimi more consistent with even less time in between orchestrated yelps.
Well, it had been almost a week and Mimi was not adapting. The barking was constant and it was hard not to notice that these kids are pretty much watching themselves. Their toys all seem to be from thrift stores and they carry around kitchen knives as accessories to hack at plants – that is one of their main little games. So dragging around Mimi by a rope and not feeding it (these kids don’t seem to eat much outside of empty tostada flat shells) is only making the dog more miserable – he/she roams the neighborhood for food, barking all the way, scampering back “home” when something seems to threaten it, with more barking to reassert dominance over the fenced-in territory.
We call animal control. Left a message three times. No response. I bet Huntington Park has a massive Animal Control budget and perks and vacation time and fat-assed administrators taking long lunch breaks, but the city has a pack-of-wild dogs problem and doesn’t do jack shit about it, not even returning the calls. Sunday night and Monday night we got little sleep. I phoned in a report of a stray, who knows, possibly rabid or infectious, being kept by a group of unsupervised kids. NO response. The lazy, overpaid fat-asses in Huntington Park Animal Control did not respond.
So I was grumpy and sleep-deprived but still took in the new issue of the magazine to the printers today and came home to see Mimi roving the alley. I called HP Animal Control yet again and got the recording. That is when I took matters into my own hands. I realized that if HPAC had actually shown up, they would have taken the dog to the pound. I was simply requesting a free middleman for my problem. I asked the kids next door whose dog it was. The oldest girl, she is 8, said it was hers and nobody challenged this. I told her I wanted to buy Mimi from her. She said “Okay, can I have five dollars?” I borrowed a kennel cage, put Mimi in it and drove her to the Downey Pound. I got sad. The dog didn’t make a peep in that cage at all.
At the entrance to the Pound there is the slogan: Duty With Compassion. I started to cry a little. Then I waited in a line and a sheriff gave me the once over – I absolutely hate it when they ask for your ID and start entering information. This was tough. On the way over I thought I could just let the dog run free, but that would be bullshit – it would starve or get run over by a car. I saw some homeless people and thought about asking them if they wanted it, but that was just a play at assuaging my own guilt that would have been an imposition and wrong.
I got the kennel cage out and was going to take Mimi back when we made eye contact and the dog started that insane barking. I did it. I handed Mimi over to the sheriffs and they put the dog in a cage and maybe Mimi will be adopted in the next week, but most likely she will be destroyed. Animal Control didn’t do this for me, I had to stand up and do it. I feel terrible but what the hell was to be done? I am angriest, upon reflection, at the motherfuckers who dumped Mimi in the first place – the packs of wild dogs in South Central are dangerous and disgusting. One of those kids may have been bit and infected, someone could have gotten attacked by a big dog, who the hell knows – dumping your animal on the street is chickenshit and cowardly. I am not proud of what I did, but I WILL sleep better tonight.
Goodbye Mimi, you deserved better owners and socialization the first time around.