A few nights ago, as The Wife and I were preparing for bed, we heard a bunch of rustling and banging coming from our side and then back yard. The noises were followed by a barking that clearly didn’t belong to our dog. I went out to investigate, just catching a glimpse of a brown flash as whatever it was leapt onto our fence and scrambled over the top. I didn’t get a good look, but it appeared to be a dog. Fifteen or twenty minutes later, the same dog returned, making more noise. This time I got out there with a flashlight in time to see that it was a boxer or possibly a pit bull. It took off down the street and wouldn’t come near me when I called it.

He returned two nights later. Again, sometime after midnight, and again screwing with my sleep. I say “he” because it’s clear that he hasn’t had his appointment with the chop doctor. On this second visit, we managed to coax him to us with a few dog biscuits, which he never actually ate. He had the strangest collar, a combination of leather and plastic zip ties. He did have tags and we called the number on the first, 972-LOST, only to get a recording. We also called animal control, who apparently only operate between 7am and 7pm unless the animal is acting aggressively. I don’t know if growling and biting at me when I tried to read the tags on his collar counts, but given the lack of satisfactory response from Animal Control, I’ll claim aggression next time. We filed a report on the dog with no hope of keeping him around until morning as attempts to tie him up in either the front yard or the back yard resulted in barking fits that were sure to disturb the rest of the neighborhood.

I called animal control again at 7am the next morning, hoping to get someone out to look for this dog. They dutifully took my report and I suspect that we now have to reports in their records, one from me in the morning and one from The Wife the night before. I left for work after making the report, confident that nothing would be resolved. The Wife returned to the house later that morning to find two tags on our door, informing us that our dog has been loose in the neighborhood and that we needed to present him with tags to the responding animal control officer. Genius. We appear to have sicked animal control on ourselves. Attempts to contact the officer who left the notes on our door this week have proved fruitless. We did get some good stuff from the 972-LOST people, however. They called back and gave us the name of the owner, his phone number and the name of the dog. With that info, I should be able to resolve the issue myself.

So what have we learned? Animal Control is useless when dealing with a stray that comes after 7pm, isn’t overly aggressive and won’t be contained. In fact, they’re so useless that they’ll turn your own report around on you and accuse you of not keeping up with your dog. Hooray for Animal Control!