Suburban warfare

The neighborhood I live in is heavily treed, and these trees support a diverse range of wildlife. We've seen opossums, raccoons, more squirrels than one could count, and many different kinds of birds. There have also been sightings reported of a fox and a coyote. But my recent nemesis is a more familiar foe: canis lupus.

For months, there has been a large, increasingly mangy, black and gray dog roaming around the neighborhood. He has a collar but appears to have been lost or abandoned. He is a scraggly beast who sniffs around houses, fouls on lawns, and feeds on garbage. Several times he has ripped into my garbage bags during the night when I've had them set out for trash pickup. It's been a hassle to clean up. We called animal control once, but they wouldn't do anything unless we had the dog in hand.

Yesterday evening, I managed to lure the dog into my fenced side yard and lock him in. Feeling sympathetic, I had my son feed him a couple of hot dogs and a drink while I tried to call animal control. In the small city I came from, this would have been simple. I would have called the police station, and within an hour, an animal control officer would have been at the home to take the dog away. In fact, just such a thing happened with a stray we caught in our last home.

Here, however, jurisdiction of services is always a crazy jumble. We don't live within the city limits of the big city, but they have extraterritorial jurisdiction over certain matters. We have utility districts, regulated and deregulated utility providers, homeowners associations, county, city, state, and private services. We signed our son up for football and swimming, which involved not a city recreational league, but a confusing hodgepoge of 501(c) organizations with different rules, signup periods, and rules. It's strange.

And so it was with animal control. It was difficult to find out online who I should even call about this dog. I eventually called the sheriff's dispatch for our part of the county and was told that I needed to call animal control. Unfortunately, the number they provided me was disconnected. I finally found what seemed to be the right number, but I got a recording telling me to call back between 9-5, M-F. I briefly considered putting the dog in the car and driving far away, then releasing him, but I worried that (1) he would run away and not get in the car, or (2) he would get scared or angry and trash my car while I was driving. So, I decided to wait until morning.

At about 1:00 am this denizen of the Baskervilles revealed his secret weapon. His bark is worse than his bite.

The dog began howling and barking incessantly. Half asleep and barely dressed, I stumbled outside and, not knowing what else to do, I opened the gate. The dog ran away, barking at me. I yelled back, trying to scare him away, weakly hoping I'd taught him a lesson.

This morning, I went outside to find my garbage bags shredded as never before. Broken glass, diaper poo, and semi-confidential papers I'd lazily not shredded were all strewn about the driveway and street. The hellhound was nowhere to be seen. I can only hope he ingested a deadly cocktail of glass and diapers, but this round goes to the dog.