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Mutt patrol

>>>> There’s more to being a dogcatcher than just catching dogs

by CHRIS BARRY

Name: Patrick Piccinini
Age: 35
Nickname: Bitchi-Queenie
Occupation: Patrolman, aka dogcatcher.
Salary: $9 and change an hour. “You don’t work at the SPCA for the money.”
Bio: This vivacious Chomedey resident’s dogcatching career began four-and-a-half years ago when he was court-ordered to do community work at the SPCA in order to pay off his speeding tickets. So impressed was he with the organization, he stayed on as a volunteer long after his tickets were paid off and eventually landed the full-time gig of patrolman.

Do people ever treat him like a villain because they’ve watched too many Huckleberry Hound cartoons? No. “Sometimes people bark at me, sometimes they point and laugh, and some people come up and ask me if we’re just going to take the animal back and kill it. But this isn’t what the SPCA is about. Part of my job is to educate the public.”

One call he gets all the time: Rounding up renegade junkyard attack dogs. “Once they’re out of that environment they are just dogs like any others. The trick is to get them to come to you, using different tones of voice until you find one that they respond to-and never, ever, look them in the eye.”

Would he like to trade lives with a junkyard dog? No. “They are usually left in cages all day, have no human contact, are devocalized, have their nails taken out so they don’t scratch any cars and are often trained in ways that I, at least, consider abusive.”

Some exotic animals he has rescued: A boa constrictor tangled up in a fence and a six-foot lizard.

Is he scared of snakes? Not any more.

Did he discover his six-foot lizard cruising up and down Ste-Catherine? No.

What he’ll do with a crazed skunk he finds trapped under your back porch: Turn him loose in your backyard. “People need to understand that I’m not going to take an animal and release him into a new environment just because you don’t want him around your property. Your backyard is his natural environment. Maybe that skunk has babies waiting to be fed. The animals lived on this property long before it became somebody’s house. But, you know, a lot of people don’t take kindly to this information.”

Has he ever been blasted by a skunk? Yes. “The worst time was when I accidentally tripped and landed with my face right at the skunk’s behind. I got the full spray in my face. For weeks afterwards, everything I ate tasted of skunk.”

The hardest animals to catch: Bats.

Something he likes to do: Go camping up in the Rawdon area with the big happy family that is the SPCA.

Last book read: When Elephants Weep: The Emotional Lives of Animals, by Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson and Susan McCarthy.

Musical tastes: Alice in Chains, Nirvana.

Favourite film of all time: Dr. Dolittle.

Words of wisdom: “Live life. You only live once so you had better live it to the fullest.” :

Comments? dimwit@openface.ca