neighborhood puppy mill

On Saturday, a man built a crude enclosure out of boards and chicken wire in the front yard of a rental house down the street. Then he put four dogs in the enclosure. One was female. She had great big teets full of milk dangling down from her belly.

The house is on a busy corner and the dogs were nervous about all the commotion. They kept barking and barking. Our dogs, in turn, were made nervous by the barking, and they started barking too. Allie and I were unnerved.

We decided to go up the street and ask what was up.

The man who built the fence said he would be keeping the dogs there permanently, 24/7. But, he said, he planned to build a privacy fence as soon as he could, probably in two or three weeks.

The dogs spent the night out in the elements. They only woke us a couple of times with their barking.

The next day the man was back with a pickup full of particle board. He spent the afternoon nailing it up on the kennel. It looked just as crappy as it sounds.

Then, at about quarter to two this morning, Allie woke up and looked out the window. "Oh my god," she said, "you've got to see this."

I got up and looked. There was a man on the sidewalk talking on a cell phone. All around him ran about ten chubby little puppies.

In our sleepy state we thought it was a stranger out for a midnight stroll with a pack of leashless puppies. But we soon realized it was our neighbor, Roberto. He was out there with his partner, Curtis, trying to figure out what to do with all of these puppies that had escaped from the kennel. When we came outside, he said he had almost run over one of them when he got home from work.

He'd called the cops, of course. But they said they couldn't do anything. Only animal control could deal with it, and they're strictly nine-to-five.

We debated a bunch of solutions. We cursed the guy who'd left the animals out like this. No one was home at the rental. There was no dog house for the dogs, no food, no water, and it was starting to rain.

Finally we decided to put them back in the enclosure and seel off the escape holes with cinder blocks.

This morning we woke up and called the city's action center. While on the phone, Allie asked my to go out and write down the exact address. In the process, I discovered that all the dogs were gone. Someone had come in the middle of the night and taken them all away.

All that remains is the crude enclosure made of boards, chicken wire and particle board.