As some of you know, my wife fell back in October and broke both of her arms. Since then, I have turned off my fire beeper and have not responded with my volunteer department since then. This morning, I turned my beeper back on for the first time. The first call I get was tonight, around 10:30pm. The call came in as an "investigation." We dutifully drove to the station and then to the address in our department vehicles. There, we found an intoxicated resident claiming that there was a dog trapped in the large gulley behind his house. There was concern, as we are not animal control officers and do not have the equipment to deal with animals, trapped or otherwise, but we appraised the situation to see what we could do. Upon closer examination of the area, it was discovered that the imperiled dog was in fact a....raccoon. Yes, a raccoon. The rest of the story concerns the car parked in front of our station when we arrived to answer the call. It blocked two truck bays, our tanker and our brush truck, neither of which we needed for this call. Regardless, we called for a wrecker to removed it as we were leaving and it arrived shortly after we returned from the call. We don't know who left the car there or why but they will have a towing bill in excess of $100 for their indescretion. It certainly was a great return to service call for me.
A racoon, not exactly the way you expected to go back to work, but I bet this will still be one of the most memorable interventions of your career because you'd been waiting for it for weeks.
LOL Hard to mistake a 'coon for a dog, unless copious quantities of "adult beverages" are involved. Always good when a call is able to be laughed away afterwards! As for the car....the idiot should be fined more than $100 (include some mandatory community service) for blocking a fire station driveway like that. Had the call turned out to be more serious...
We can't afford dogs here. A raccoon is a good second choice, making fine hats after expiry. You have to be rich to own a raccoon. Most of us can only afford a small spider or a few ants. But not both.
Here´s the real gourmet!!! BTW, Jeff, can we open a donor fund for poppy to buy him a cockroach or a few moths to play with? Anybody should have a pet!
I know cockroaches can live through anything, but I don't think moths can survive in the frozen north.
hey, i like raccoon!, and no it don't taste like chicken,lol.just parboil it, then you bbq it,or what ever else you want to use it in.
Turn your beeper back off. Then you won't be bothered by these nonsense calls. A raccoon here is presumed to be rabid, so distance is called for.
Ha! Man thats poor...! When i was young, we were so poor, we'd gather around Dad when he farted...Just to smell a warm meal...
They're all over the place here. We worry about rabies only if they come up the yard and don't leave, as we do with foxes, coyotes, opossums and armadillos. Our little Sheltie killed 2 juvenile raccoons several years ago in back of our house. I guess if there were any more, they decided to move on to other pastures. Deer here are danged nuisance, too. You just about can't throw a dead cat without hitting one.
Well I often feel as poor as Poppy.....as around here we sometimes can only find inverted crawfish for company........ as a Yankee once commented amongst soldiers at White Sands that for desert there sure was a lot of crawfish walking around when the New Mexican had to point out they were not crawfish but scorpions of slightly different body arrangements well suited to the desert and a bit less beneficial to make company with. As to raccoons.......shoot em and make a hat or they will do no end of mischief. As one got into a storage barn of commercial fertilizer bags....the varmint scratched open every bag looking for grain and we had to clean up and load the fertilizer hopper with hundreds of scratched open bags. After opening a couple they did not give up on their hope of finding grain and opened every one of several hundred bags. Needless to say this made an endless mess out of handling the fertilizer....all due to a raccoon visit.
Deer are a nuisance here, too. We've managed to encroach on their living space, then we're surprised when their numbers increase in areas like parks, and back yards. We even had three in our yard two or three years ago. I have pictures of them. We don't see many of the others, except for opossums. A few years ago, our house cat got out for the night, and left seven dead baby opossums as a "gift" for me.
Yeah, we've got a couple of 'possums that hang out in our neighborhood. Met one about two feet from the back door, hiding behind the BBQ grill as one of our beagles made his "midnight run". Once he got done watering the yard, he immediately went into "ohholycrapthere'ssomethingintheyard" mode, and eventually homed in on the grill. I was standing there with the storm door cracked open, trying to get him back inside, which is how I discovered the possum. It started hissing when it got cornered (me on one side, Max coming up from the other side of the grill)...got the broom and stuck it between possum and door, managed to hang on to it, get Max inside, and keep the possum from bolting in the house. Not bad for 2am.
Nice one mate! ...Luv the "ohholycrapthere'ssomethingintheyard" mode!" Ha!...Ive seen my dog in that mode...but hadnt thought to name it...its very apt.
Was the raccoon made to pay for its indescretion? It is the other way around here. The deer are encroaching on our living space. There were no deer in this part of the state until the 1930s, when they were brought from up north down here to live. Now they tear up more cars than Budweiser. Pop him with the soft end of a broom a couple of times and he'll be all nice and still for you, trying to make you think he is dead. Then, pick up by the tail and put him where you want him.
