More actually, some memories of my career in Animal Control.
I had experience with both kinds of those guns, shotguns were experienced as a sender and almost reciever from one!
A T-gun or 'Tranquilizer' gun is a gun that can be either a sci-fi looking handgun style CO2 cartridge fired pistol. Or it could be a 22 caliber blank fired rifle. Both types used the same kind of hollow aluminum tube as the dart/syringe for the tranquilizing drug. The front of the dart was a barbed injector, in the early days we used to use the non-barbed kind but they were too often lost. With the barbed kind of tip they were usually stuck in the dog, or tree, or dirt if you missed, if you could actually find the dart again! When fired, the dart had a low power gunpowder cartridge inside that went off to push a plunger that started to inject the solution as the dart traveled to the target/animal.
One thing that was forever a problem was the public perception of how the tranquilizer actually worked. Seemed like just about everyone had seen an animal show or two that had shown how the animal was darted, then the next scene usually was the animal quietly laying down breathing slowly just waiting for the pros's to come and go over or cage the animal.
NEVER EVER happened like that in the real world!!!!
In EVERY attempt I did myself or was involved in in my 25 years, what usually happened was this;
you got to the scene, you took a look at what you were going to try to dart. For our department it was almost always an area dog that just couldn't be caught any other way. The T-gun was a method of last resort because of it's failure rate. After several days or weeks of trying, it couldn't be contained in a trap or the local citizens just didn't want it confined in their yard! So we'd get a few ACO's out to try to 'tranq' it.
You needed people to be chasers because the one thing that almost always happened was if you were lucky enough to actually hit the animal, it would literally take off running. It had to hurt! There was no scene cut like the TV shows, so it could take 20 minutes or MORE for the drug to take effect. And that was if you didn't chase but just followed the dog. If it was actively chased, most dog's adrenalin would kick in to counteract the drugs, taking longer or even nullifying the drugs effect.
A lot of 'ifs' here, but if the dog wasn't lost after darting and if the dog was relaxed and in an accessible area, and if you could still kind of sneak up on it and get the 'control stick' (the pole with the cable noose on it) around its neck before it would try to run again, you might have actually caught it!
Many dogs were lost after darting. They'd just runaway and couldn't be found. Many would come back a few days or a week or so longer with the dart still hanging off it. Many darts were lost because none of the dart guns were exactly accurate as the distances grew. It was the closer the better!
The darted dog would be loaded into a truck to be taken to a vets office. There was always the wound from the dart, and on some dogs it was a pretty nasty hole when that big barb was pulled out. Also the drug mixture was never an exact science and it was real easy to overdose and kill the animal. So to the vet before the shelter. After an okay from the vet, then it was to the shelter to sleep it off and be caught in a cage for usually the rest of it's life.
I darted many, many dogs and even a goat once. Small animals were never darted as even the low power charge was enough to potentially kill cats or small dogs by going right through them. In the early days, all the ACO's carried the hand gun style T-Guns. Most were kept in various stages of rust as they were seldom used and most of the ACO's didn't care about them and just let them rattle around under the seat in their trucks.
Over the years the laws changed and all the tranq equipment was regulated to Supervisors to deal with. To me those handgun style guns were pretty well useless. I kept pretty good care of mine I thought, kept it in a padded case, clean and dry. But the seals that kept in CO2 contained often failed and by the time the solution would be mixed, the dart loaded, and you'd actually fire the thing, it would be just like a comedy and shot out maybe 20 feet or less and arc into the dirt. And because of the guns were so seldom used everything had to be mixed right before use. Nothing could be made in advance for just "lock and load" kind of use. In fact the drugs used became superglue as they evaporated and many of the darts were wrecked and unusable when that happened, They were stck never to be opened again! The rifles were/are much better. When I was a Supervisor I had one of those. Much more successful with that then anything else.
As for shotguns, well, only the Supervisors and most of the "outlying" ACO's carried them. I carried mine and kept it cleaned oiled and ready to go, I only used mine once at a call in Helendale California.
Way out in the 'boonies' was an older lady that had lived at her small shack house since the 1940's. No piped in water, she had a water tank, no electricity, like so many other areas the world had grown up around her and her decades of isolation were now acreage lots with new expensive homes nearby. She had, through many years and generations of never spaying or neutering her dogs, amassed over 100 mostly feral aggressive wild dogs. They roamed for miles in the area around her place. Although she went through over 50lbs of dog food a week, the dogs mainly existed by pack hunting and eating everything they could catch. As these new home sites were occupied her dogs began to kill and eat the small dogs owned by the new residents.
So it became a 'problem'. One of the first times I was actually able to find her place it was a scene I'd seen many times before. Because of her age, she wasn't a collector of dogs as many were, she just wasn't able to deal with them anymore and just let them live on their own. Her very small two room place was little pathways in between stacks full of years of newspapers, books, stuff. She had a path to her couch, her bed, her bathroom. Outside were decades old dead cars and pick-ups, several years worth of large piles of old dog food cans and bags. All kinds of sun bleached old antiques, toys, more newspapers and books, so on and so on.
We'd made a few attempts with the traps to no effect. She wouldn't stop feeding them and the traps only worked if the animal was hungry enough to go in it. After threats and bargaining, it was decided to have almost the entire high desert staff meet out at the place to 'take out' as many as we could to 'solve' the problem.
In the late morning when most of the dogs were in the area of the house, four of us waited hidden by the junk on the property and the dogs came in for the fresh food set out for them.
When they got close we all opened fire. I don't remember how many were killed, we did make a dent in the population, but it still took a few months and a few more "hunts" before it was solved. I never did anything like I just described again. Maybe that's why I never liked hunting, I didn't get anything from this experience worth repeating.
The closest I was ever to being intentionally shot myself was at a little old ladies house in Yucaipa California. I was there because neighbors were complaining about all these dogs that ran loose on a cul-de sac street. The dogs would bother their kids and they just got tired of it. So I was the one that got the call. I made contact and talked to the complaining residents. They pointed out the house they felt responsible and I drove over to it. I parked in front by the driveway. I walked up, knocked on the door and met with a seemingly nice older lady. It was all so routine, I explained the problem, explained the laws and her responsibility. She told me that all the dogs belonged to her and because of this and her inability to show any licenses for them, I gave her a ticket for all of them with the understanding that if she'd find homes or get rid of the ones over the legal limit for the area, I'd void the ticket and she wouldn't have to go to court and pay any fines. Told her good luck, went out to the truck, turned around and was ready to go on to my next call. As I'm making my way to leave the street, a group of neighbors stop an ask me why I'm not taking any of the dogs. I tell them that she'd said they were all hers and that she'd accepted a ticket and I'd work with her. They said that she'd lied and only one dog was hers. All the rest were area dogs she'd found loose and just brought home and kept.
So I turn around again and go to her house to get her to give the dogs to me. I walk up and knock on the door. She doesn't come to the door this time. I knock more because I know she hadn't left. She'd have had to go by me since this was a dead end cul-de sac street.
I walk over to her living room picture window. The curtains were open and I saw her standing in the living room. I yell for her to come over to the door as I needed to talk with her again. She nodded and so I went back to the door.
I waited for a few minutes, then just before I'm about to knock again I see her shadow behind the door through the angular panes of colored glass in the upper part of the door. Then, just like in an old west movie, the barrel of a shotgun breaks through a pane of the colored glass. She then uses the barrel to clean out the fragments of glass remaining in the square. HOLY you know what!! I moved away from the doorway to the side of the house. Big mistake number 1, I had again parked directly in front of her house, so there was no way I could safely take a chance at getting to the truck and get away. I was calling on my H.T. (Handy Talky) portable radio, trying to get into our dispatch to tell someone there what was going on. I switched the radio to the sheriff's bands and called their dispatch and told them I need units to respond NOW!
In memory it seems like it was forever, but since I was only about 5 minutes from the Yucaipa substation, it had to have been a matter of a few minutes. I was later told I'd cleared out the building with deputies heading out to respond to this call! After almost all the area sheriff cars get there, I watch as they break down her door, all with guns drawn, and take her into custody. The Sheriff Sargent has me come back to the substation to file a report. He tells me at the station that the gun was very loaded and if she'd pulled the trigger instead of shove it through the door window, I'd been all the way dead! So I file a report and formal complaint against her with assurances that she'll be in jail for quite a while. While there I learn that she's been dealing with the sheriff's office for quite a while. They'd been called once when she'd gone to the school bus stop naked and then poured oil all over herself. She'd also threatened several of her neighbors at various times. She was not supposed to have any firearms around since she was supposed to be under psychiatric care and on medications for her mental problems.
I later found out that she'd been released that same afternoon and was back at home. She'd supposedly not been taking her medications which caused her condition with me. The shot gun was a relatives and that was even returned as long as it was taken to another house.
Several months later I had a call to the same house for another problem. When I got there, she was all composed and apologized for what had happened. She'd gotten her dogs licensed and wanted to show me she was "better".
I never had to go there again so I guess she must have been!
Once while at a call, a dispute between neighbors, the older neighbor got into a yelling match with the younger neighbor. The older guy went inside an came out with a shotgun. I was able to get him to take the gun back inside by telling him if he didn't I'd make sure he'd go directly to jail. He finally calmed down and put the gun away. When I left they were, not really "bud's", but they were okay with all that happened.
Over the years I went out on several calls after hours responding with local police or the sheriff's department. Usually the aggressive or "vicious" dog calls. At a call in the desert I almost got shot by a deputy when we were in a big back yard in the dark and the dog ran by and scared him causing him to fire a couple of rounds from his automatic weapon. Scared ME!
Another time in the City of Ontario in the late 1980's, I was out a house where the city police wanted to get inside. There was a not nice pit bull chained up right by the front door. They wanted the dog gone so I was there to get it. They had me go up and two city PD guys stood behind telling me they'll shoot if "anything goes wrong". Now, I was between the dog at the door and them with their guns behind me, NOT a good place to be!! I told them to back WAY off and put the guns away if they wanted me to get the dog for them! They did, and I got the dog. They got inside and nobody was there anyway!
I was also on several calls where I was the innocuous Animal Control Officer that went to the front door and when the resident saw an ACO and opened up, the hiding police or sheriff's would rush them and get inside.
Boy, those were the days huh!!!!
More later, Tad
I had experience with both kinds of those guns, shotguns were experienced as a sender and almost reciever from one!
A T-gun or 'Tranquilizer' gun is a gun that can be either a sci-fi looking handgun style CO2 cartridge fired pistol. Or it could be a 22 caliber blank fired rifle. Both types used the same kind of hollow aluminum tube as the dart/syringe for the tranquilizing drug. The front of the dart was a barbed injector, in the early days we used to use the non-barbed kind but they were too often lost. With the barbed kind of tip they were usually stuck in the dog, or tree, or dirt if you missed, if you could actually find the dart again! When fired, the dart had a low power gunpowder cartridge inside that went off to push a plunger that started to inject the solution as the dart traveled to the target/animal.
One thing that was forever a problem was the public perception of how the tranquilizer actually worked. Seemed like just about everyone had seen an animal show or two that had shown how the animal was darted, then the next scene usually was the animal quietly laying down breathing slowly just waiting for the pros's to come and go over or cage the animal.
NEVER EVER happened like that in the real world!!!!
In EVERY attempt I did myself or was involved in in my 25 years, what usually happened was this;
you got to the scene, you took a look at what you were going to try to dart. For our department it was almost always an area dog that just couldn't be caught any other way. The T-gun was a method of last resort because of it's failure rate. After several days or weeks of trying, it couldn't be contained in a trap or the local citizens just didn't want it confined in their yard! So we'd get a few ACO's out to try to 'tranq' it.
You needed people to be chasers because the one thing that almost always happened was if you were lucky enough to actually hit the animal, it would literally take off running. It had to hurt! There was no scene cut like the TV shows, so it could take 20 minutes or MORE for the drug to take effect. And that was if you didn't chase but just followed the dog. If it was actively chased, most dog's adrenalin would kick in to counteract the drugs, taking longer or even nullifying the drugs effect.
A lot of 'ifs' here, but if the dog wasn't lost after darting and if the dog was relaxed and in an accessible area, and if you could still kind of sneak up on it and get the 'control stick' (the pole with the cable noose on it) around its neck before it would try to run again, you might have actually caught it!
Many dogs were lost after darting. They'd just runaway and couldn't be found. Many would come back a few days or a week or so longer with the dart still hanging off it. Many darts were lost because none of the dart guns were exactly accurate as the distances grew. It was the closer the better!
The darted dog would be loaded into a truck to be taken to a vets office. There was always the wound from the dart, and on some dogs it was a pretty nasty hole when that big barb was pulled out. Also the drug mixture was never an exact science and it was real easy to overdose and kill the animal. So to the vet before the shelter. After an okay from the vet, then it was to the shelter to sleep it off and be caught in a cage for usually the rest of it's life.
I darted many, many dogs and even a goat once. Small animals were never darted as even the low power charge was enough to potentially kill cats or small dogs by going right through them. In the early days, all the ACO's carried the hand gun style T-Guns. Most were kept in various stages of rust as they were seldom used and most of the ACO's didn't care about them and just let them rattle around under the seat in their trucks.
Over the years the laws changed and all the tranq equipment was regulated to Supervisors to deal with. To me those handgun style guns were pretty well useless. I kept pretty good care of mine I thought, kept it in a padded case, clean and dry. But the seals that kept in CO2 contained often failed and by the time the solution would be mixed, the dart loaded, and you'd actually fire the thing, it would be just like a comedy and shot out maybe 20 feet or less and arc into the dirt. And because of the guns were so seldom used everything had to be mixed right before use. Nothing could be made in advance for just "lock and load" kind of use. In fact the drugs used became superglue as they evaporated and many of the darts were wrecked and unusable when that happened, They were stck never to be opened again! The rifles were/are much better. When I was a Supervisor I had one of those. Much more successful with that then anything else.
As for shotguns, well, only the Supervisors and most of the "outlying" ACO's carried them. I carried mine and kept it cleaned oiled and ready to go, I only used mine once at a call in Helendale California.
Way out in the 'boonies' was an older lady that had lived at her small shack house since the 1940's. No piped in water, she had a water tank, no electricity, like so many other areas the world had grown up around her and her decades of isolation were now acreage lots with new expensive homes nearby. She had, through many years and generations of never spaying or neutering her dogs, amassed over 100 mostly feral aggressive wild dogs. They roamed for miles in the area around her place. Although she went through over 50lbs of dog food a week, the dogs mainly existed by pack hunting and eating everything they could catch. As these new home sites were occupied her dogs began to kill and eat the small dogs owned by the new residents.
So it became a 'problem'. One of the first times I was actually able to find her place it was a scene I'd seen many times before. Because of her age, she wasn't a collector of dogs as many were, she just wasn't able to deal with them anymore and just let them live on their own. Her very small two room place was little pathways in between stacks full of years of newspapers, books, stuff. She had a path to her couch, her bed, her bathroom. Outside were decades old dead cars and pick-ups, several years worth of large piles of old dog food cans and bags. All kinds of sun bleached old antiques, toys, more newspapers and books, so on and so on.
We'd made a few attempts with the traps to no effect. She wouldn't stop feeding them and the traps only worked if the animal was hungry enough to go in it. After threats and bargaining, it was decided to have almost the entire high desert staff meet out at the place to 'take out' as many as we could to 'solve' the problem.
In the late morning when most of the dogs were in the area of the house, four of us waited hidden by the junk on the property and the dogs came in for the fresh food set out for them.
When they got close we all opened fire. I don't remember how many were killed, we did make a dent in the population, but it still took a few months and a few more "hunts" before it was solved. I never did anything like I just described again. Maybe that's why I never liked hunting, I didn't get anything from this experience worth repeating.
The closest I was ever to being intentionally shot myself was at a little old ladies house in Yucaipa California. I was there because neighbors were complaining about all these dogs that ran loose on a cul-de sac street. The dogs would bother their kids and they just got tired of it. So I was the one that got the call. I made contact and talked to the complaining residents. They pointed out the house they felt responsible and I drove over to it. I parked in front by the driveway. I walked up, knocked on the door and met with a seemingly nice older lady. It was all so routine, I explained the problem, explained the laws and her responsibility. She told me that all the dogs belonged to her and because of this and her inability to show any licenses for them, I gave her a ticket for all of them with the understanding that if she'd find homes or get rid of the ones over the legal limit for the area, I'd void the ticket and she wouldn't have to go to court and pay any fines. Told her good luck, went out to the truck, turned around and was ready to go on to my next call. As I'm making my way to leave the street, a group of neighbors stop an ask me why I'm not taking any of the dogs. I tell them that she'd said they were all hers and that she'd accepted a ticket and I'd work with her. They said that she'd lied and only one dog was hers. All the rest were area dogs she'd found loose and just brought home and kept.
So I turn around again and go to her house to get her to give the dogs to me. I walk up and knock on the door. She doesn't come to the door this time. I knock more because I know she hadn't left. She'd have had to go by me since this was a dead end cul-de sac street.
I walk over to her living room picture window. The curtains were open and I saw her standing in the living room. I yell for her to come over to the door as I needed to talk with her again. She nodded and so I went back to the door.
I waited for a few minutes, then just before I'm about to knock again I see her shadow behind the door through the angular panes of colored glass in the upper part of the door. Then, just like in an old west movie, the barrel of a shotgun breaks through a pane of the colored glass. She then uses the barrel to clean out the fragments of glass remaining in the square. HOLY you know what!! I moved away from the doorway to the side of the house. Big mistake number 1, I had again parked directly in front of her house, so there was no way I could safely take a chance at getting to the truck and get away. I was calling on my H.T. (Handy Talky) portable radio, trying to get into our dispatch to tell someone there what was going on. I switched the radio to the sheriff's bands and called their dispatch and told them I need units to respond NOW!
In memory it seems like it was forever, but since I was only about 5 minutes from the Yucaipa substation, it had to have been a matter of a few minutes. I was later told I'd cleared out the building with deputies heading out to respond to this call! After almost all the area sheriff cars get there, I watch as they break down her door, all with guns drawn, and take her into custody. The Sheriff Sargent has me come back to the substation to file a report. He tells me at the station that the gun was very loaded and if she'd pulled the trigger instead of shove it through the door window, I'd been all the way dead! So I file a report and formal complaint against her with assurances that she'll be in jail for quite a while. While there I learn that she's been dealing with the sheriff's office for quite a while. They'd been called once when she'd gone to the school bus stop naked and then poured oil all over herself. She'd also threatened several of her neighbors at various times. She was not supposed to have any firearms around since she was supposed to be under psychiatric care and on medications for her mental problems.
I later found out that she'd been released that same afternoon and was back at home. She'd supposedly not been taking her medications which caused her condition with me. The shot gun was a relatives and that was even returned as long as it was taken to another house.
Several months later I had a call to the same house for another problem. When I got there, she was all composed and apologized for what had happened. She'd gotten her dogs licensed and wanted to show me she was "better".
I never had to go there again so I guess she must have been!
Once while at a call, a dispute between neighbors, the older neighbor got into a yelling match with the younger neighbor. The older guy went inside an came out with a shotgun. I was able to get him to take the gun back inside by telling him if he didn't I'd make sure he'd go directly to jail. He finally calmed down and put the gun away. When I left they were, not really "bud's", but they were okay with all that happened.
Over the years I went out on several calls after hours responding with local police or the sheriff's department. Usually the aggressive or "vicious" dog calls. At a call in the desert I almost got shot by a deputy when we were in a big back yard in the dark and the dog ran by and scared him causing him to fire a couple of rounds from his automatic weapon. Scared ME!
Another time in the City of Ontario in the late 1980's, I was out a house where the city police wanted to get inside. There was a not nice pit bull chained up right by the front door. They wanted the dog gone so I was there to get it. They had me go up and two city PD guys stood behind telling me they'll shoot if "anything goes wrong". Now, I was between the dog at the door and them with their guns behind me, NOT a good place to be!! I told them to back WAY off and put the guns away if they wanted me to get the dog for them! They did, and I got the dog. They got inside and nobody was there anyway!
I was also on several calls where I was the innocuous Animal Control Officer that went to the front door and when the resident saw an ACO and opened up, the hiding police or sheriff's would rush them and get inside.
Boy, those were the days huh!!!!
More later, Tad
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