The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

Hits: 19

In 1973 I worked at a dog pound in Madison, Wisconsin. What we called a Humane Society. We adopted 40 % of our mutts … meaning, we killed 60% of the animals, the correct euphemism being euthanized. The national average was 25% adopted so we patted ourselves on the back. My minimum wage job was to clean puppy cages and help kill critters. Let’s just say it’s a short career track unless you’re a practicing sadist, which I am not.

In fact, I adopted three dogs myself, maybe not a big deal if I lived on a country estate with acreage for the hounds to chase rabbits and deer for days on end, but I lived in a second story one bedroom apartment over a TV repair shop. Hard to believe now, looking back. No, not three dogs in a small apartment. That there used to be TV repair shops. When’s the last time you remember fixing a television rather than buy a new one?

One day at the pound they needed me to man the front desk, something I’d never done previously, something that might just lead me up a rung on the promotional ladder. I asked what was expected of me up here at the front door and was told I would direct folks to the kennels where they could inspect their future pets. Beats shoveling shit, I thought.

My first encounter with the public was a woman bringing in her old dog and its 4 new puppies. “I can’t take care of these,” she said, pointing at the little wiggling pups in a cardboard box. I asked if maybe she might’ve considered spaying as an option. She shook her head. “Costs money,” she answered. “So you want to leave the mother too? Hasn’t she been with you awhile?” I asked. “Yeah, I’m tired of her too.” Oddly, this pissed me off.

I picked up the phone to our intercom. “Larry,” I said, “fire up the incinerator. We got five to torch.” My dog whisperer seemed suddenly alarmed. Shocked even. “You gonna just kill em?” she cried.

“Whadja think?” I said cruelly. “You think people are lined up for an old dog and her litter?”
About this time Larry emerged from the back, looked at the box of pups and asked, “These?” I nodded. Larry looked at the woman with measured contempt, picked up the box and went into the back where I knew he’d unload them into the puppy cages. He’d be back for the mother shortly. I started filling out the paperwork the way a guard at Dachau would, dispassionately. Name. Address. Reason for wanting your pet killed. Basic stuff.

I guess the woman called later to see if her dogs were toast because Mike, my supervisor, called me into his office. He explained — patiently — how our job was not to judge, our job was to take in unwanted animals so they weren’t drowned in pillowcases in the lake or shot behind the barn. “We want them to bring them to us,” he sighed, painfully aware I was unfit for further front desk duty.

I lasted a few more weeks. Larry lasted a month. There are, I’ve learned, some jobs that aren’t a good ‘fit’. My trouble, of course, was that was pretty much true of all jobs.

Hits: 29

Hits: 99

So after the disillusionment of a short career in middle management as a Food Manager at the University of Wisconsin, I decided to take a job as kennel worker at the Humane Society next door to the Oscar Mayer hot dog factory which lent the area a fragrance of feral flatulence. The dog pound, every other day or so, fired up its Incinerator and burned the cats and dogs, kittens and puppies which Mike, our manager, had dispatched with an injection of phenobarbital, adding burnt hair and searing meat to the olfactory mix. We had ourselves an animal Auschwitz.

I had gone to the Pound to look for a pet, see if they had a little guy whose beseeching eyes thawed my wintry heart enough to adopt. I found a wiener dog, appropriately enough, a dachshund, and by the time I’d put the little fellow on a leash, I’d seen the sign Kennel Worker Wanted, applied for and been accepted as their new employee, start next day.

There were three of us on the crew working the pens and the outdoor runs. Larry sprayed down the pens, I was the puppy room guy and Mary Jean handled the cats. All day I cleaned the poop and piss, laid down fresh newspapers and talked to prospective adopters. My partner Larry had just gotten out of prison, served 16 months for selling LSD to a federal undercover narcotics agent, and this job was the only one he’d found where an ex-felon could get hired. Mary Jean had terminal cancer, she told us one day at lunch break, but she didn’t. She just liked the idea, I guess, of an early and tragic demise. Maybe too much soap opera in her teens.

I told myself shoveling shit was no worse — and maybe the same — as my last job, just slightly more literal. And maybe that was true. But I never killed anyone or anything at my dining hall or my grill or my ice cream parlor. Even though I did poison a few dozen folks with my toxic potato salad warmed to a microbial paradise under the heating lamps. But that, I told the cuisine cops who finally discovered the source for the rash of food poisonings, was accidental, the result of ignorance. Personally, I always like my potato salad a little on the warm side.

I lasted three months at the kennel. You can only kill so many dogs and cats before the toll on your psyche weighs on you with the tonnage of guilt no rationalization can lighten. To lighten the burden, I ended up adopting three dogs, maybe a bit too much atonement for a one bedroom upstairs apartment over a TV repair shop. But of course, that’s another story. One, for the time being, I’ll spare you.

Hits: 71