Catch me if you can

DIRTY, HAIRY Chasing down skunks, bats and false alarms is all in a day’s work for Animal Control officer Dan Nutley.

I’m standing outside an apartment complex at Argyle Street and California Avenue on a Tuesday evening, staring at a bat in a Tupperware container. Beside me are my partners for the evening, Dan Nutley and Sheryl Edgecombe, two Chicago Animal Control officers. Later tonight, we’ll be patrolling the North Side, protecting innocent civilians from the wrath of animals gone wild, but right now we’re dealing with an injured bat found on the sidewalk.

“We see bats all the time,” says Nutley, transferring the creature from Tupperware to a plastic bag with air holes. “People don’t realize that even though we’re in a city, there’s still a lot of wildlife.”

After four years with Animal Control, Nutley has seen his share of Chicago wildlife, from capturing bats to outfoxing escaped monkeys. Nutley’s proof that when you’re rolling with Animal Control, you should expect the unexpected.

“In one of my first assignments, I had to remove a skunk from a neighborhood way out on Pioneer [Avenue near Edgebrook],” he says. “When I got there, there’s not one, but five baby skunks inside a window well. For trapped skunks, we put this clear plastic wrap loosely over the cages so that if they spray, they’re not spraying you. It was pouring down rain and I was new and didn’t know how to handle skunks, so I put the plastic on my head like Little Red Riding Hood. In the process of grabbing the skunks, I got sprayed by every single one. I smelled so bad on the drive back that I couldn’t breathe. It was my first call and I had to work the rest of the day like that.”

After placing the bat safely in the truck, we get another call. An injured goose on Riverside Drive at Foster and Pulaski…we are literally going on a wild goose chase! When we arrive, the goose is fine: false alarm. There’s no injury here, only a bystander who misidentified one. The next call, for two rottweilers duking it out in an alley near Irving Park and Pulaski Roads, is a false alarm, too. By the time we get there, the animals have left, and there’s no evidence that a fight took place. The next two calls are also false alarms.

Nutley says this is how it goes on a typical night—hours of following up on fruitless calls, frequently regarding animals that flee the scene before Animal Control can arrive. And then there are days with lots of action: a couple of stray dogs marching along the Dan Ryan, a coyote spotted in an Avondale backyard and someone shot in the Loop—meaning Animal Control needs to come get the victim’s unclaimed pets.

“We see a lot of things you wouldn’t normally see—crime scenes, dog fights, cat houses with 50, 60, 70 cats—but the craziest things we see are the people,” Nutley explains. “Last summer, a woman called because there were squirrels running through her roof. Instead of having us put down traps, she took a broom handle and smashed holes in the ceiling. Plaster was falling everywhere. We got the squirrel, but she basically destroyed her own house.”

Nutley says the odd folks and unpredictable animals aren’t the tough part, though. It’s the animals who own the animals who really make the job hard.

“I’ve seen people that have tied cats down and burned them or set dogs on fire with gasoline,” he says. “I’ve seen animals starved to death. I went to one house that had over 84 cats living there; the place was just covered in fecal matter. It makes you lose a little bit of faith in humanity, but I get to see some good things, too, [such as] animals being taken away from people that are hurting them.”

Unfortunately, some animals Nutley takes in can’t be rehabilitated. Like all undomesticated animals, the bat sitting in the truck will be tested for rabies and euthanized, and the roaming pit bull the two officers picked up earlier will be given five days in Animal Control housing, then shipped off to a shelter where it risks being put to sleep. Wildlife gets put down; cats and dogs are shipped to shelters if they’re healthy enough to go—that’s standard procedure for all 28,000 to 32,000 animals the department takes in each year.

Nutley says there’s hope for the domestic animals. Many of the cats and dogs Animal Control takes in each year have been removed from abusive households; others are strays that stand a chance of finding a decent home through shelter programs. Nutley says it’s the thought of rescuing an innocent creature that makes the job worth all the skunk spray and cat feces the animal kingdom can throw at him. “It’s a good feeling knowing that we’re helping something that can’t help itself.”

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