By Suzie Ivy
Most, if not all, police officers will tell you that we never know what surprise is coming each day. I once made the statement, “I’ll never be shocked by anything again.” Wrong!
Our animal control officer is funded to work twenty-hours a week. The other one hundred and forty-eight hours, fall on the shoulders of the officers. It doesn’t matter if you’re a detective, patrol officer, or sergeant; everyone pitches in for animal calls. I’ve wrangled cows, herded horses, and coaxed more than one skittish dog into the back of my cruiser.
After becoming a detective, I was still required to work one day a week on patrol. There are good and bad aspects to this part of the job. The good is that it keeps me on my toes and my officer safety up to par. The bad is that I have an endless number of felony cases and the eight-hour shift on patrol usually adds one or two misdemeanors to the load. Sadly, I just don’t have time for them, but such is life at a small town police department.
During one of these patrol shifts, I received a call that a snake was stuck in a garbage disposal. Rattlesnakes are not prevalent in our area, but we do get a few calls a year. Bull snakes, which resemble rattlesnakes, are more common. Large bull snakes are mean and no fun to deal with. They bite and it hurts. Once caught, we bag and release them into a less populated area at the edge of town.
I arrived at the home and was surprised that the snake in question was yellow with gray stripes. The harder part was that the homeowner turned on the garbage disposal and I had a half shredded reptile on my hands. Unfortunately, it was still alive.
It truly doesn’t matter if they’re mammals, reptiles, birds, or insects, I love nature. Without going into detail, I put the poor snake out of its misery, bagged it, and took it to our kennel and disposed of it in the outside garbage dumpster.
Funny but true, an hour later dispatch called and asked for a description of the snake.
The mother of a nine-year-old boy reported her son’s pet snake as missing. I knew the odds of my dead snake and this boy’s pet snake, being one and the same, were fairly high. I was right.
I called the mother and explained what happened. I then grabbed a shoebox and towel from my home, retrieved the snake carcass and drove to their house. I was the unlucky person who notified the boy that his beloved pet was deceased. I also attended the impromptu funeral and helped give “Curly” a final resting place.
You might think these things can only happen at a small rural police department but that’s not true. When I share these stories with city cops, they can usually one up me. My son-in-law, the big bad city cop, retrieved two full-grown, illegal alligators from a backyard pool and made the nightly news. He followed the relocation of those alligators and worried about them until he was sure they found a good home at a wildlife park.
For all of us in blue, it’s more than a job – it’s life as a cop.
