WASHINGTON 2002
The Other Washington
The Washington Post’s best unsung reporters might well be Sarah Lane and her predecessor Donna Mackie, whose “District Animal Watch” column has become a marvel of minimalist prose and tragicomedy. Consisting of five to eight short items a week, the column is ostensibly about the plight and rescue of animals. It is in fact a mini-chronicle of human vice, virtue, sorrow, and folly in a corner of Washington rarely spotlighted elsewhere in the press.
The Animal Watchers have an eye for the striking detail. The neglected and emaciated guinea pigs “ate and drank ravenously.” The woman who mistook a toy snake for a live one “offered the [Animal Control] officers homemade chocolate cookies, which they accepted.” The pit bull impounded when a woman is arrested dancing naked on top of a car is named “Brittany” and has pink polish on its front toenails.
Of such specifics are miniature tragedies, horror stories, and bittersweet comedies composed. Most often, judging by the reported addresses, these tell us something disquieting about life in the District’s poorest neighborhoods.
Consider what might have been a routine account. Neighbors report a very thin pit bull in an apartment building basement. Humane Society officers tell the owner the dog will be impounded unless she improves its conditions. She agrees to surrender it. The officers follow her to the pound. Nothing special so far. But then Lane adds this: “Crying, she said she had bought the dog from a child but could not care for it properly. The dog was euthanized.” An animal-neglect vignette has suddenly become a story of human loneliness and despair.
Or take a less depressing case. A woman summons Animal Control, saying something is wrong with her two cats. “When an Animal Control officer responded, the woman said that she had had the cats for two weeks and that their eyes were turning black. The officer found that the cats were healthy and explained to the woman that cats’ eyes dilate in low light.”
The back-story here is one of ignorance and mystery. How can someone reach adulthood without realizing why we wear sunglasses outside and take them off indoors? And what of the prospects of the man who summoned Animal Control when a moth — which he mistook for a bat — flew into his dwelling? Or the woman who insisted adamantly that an intruding snake in her house was a rattler, even though it had no rattles? Officers found a common nonpoisonous brown snake, inexplicably covered with jelly.
Other items are chilling. A man walking an acquaintance’s two dogs begins beating them. Several passersby stop and cheer him on. Alerted to the scene, officers catch him brandishing the stump of a broom handle, which he admits having broken over one of the pets. When the officers return the dogs to their owner after medical treatment, she expresses surprise because the man said he had been a dog trainer for twenty years.
There’s a whole world of horror behind that yarn.
In other columns, children play catch with a baby cardinal, splatter cats on the asphalt, smash an opossum with bricks. They soak a dog in alcohol and set it ablaze. Teenagers stage fights between pit bulls and shoot and stab the dogs of rivals.
This is a side of Washington the news audience sees little of because reporters focus so much on posturing officials and pundits and middle-class travails. That makes “District Animal Watch” essential reading. It is a weekly reminder that, just blocks from elite Washington, neglected and abused children vent their rage on powerless animals until they are old enough to turn it on their own offspring. And that nothing effective is being done to stop the cycle.
Lane is a mean-streets Aesop, often selecting incidents that have dramatic irony and perhaps an implicit moral:
- Man buys attack dog. Dog attacks him.
- Teen tries to force his pit bull to mate. Animal Control has
it neutered.
- Man gets sentenced to prison. Authorities impound and euthanize his pet tarantula. When you break the law you hurt those closest to you.
Lane also gives us uplifting moments — as when a fireman, heeding the pleas of a teenaged pet owner, re-enters a burning, smoke-filled building to scoop up and resuscitate a choking ferret.
In my favorite rescue story, a woman summons Animal Control because a pack of crows is dive-bombing an injured owl. The officers arrive to find her brandishing a broom to fend off the crows. They tell her the owl is healthy and that crows commonly try to drive owls from their territory.
Even so, I like to imagine that woman sticking steadfastly to her post, every inch the idealist, tilting at crows to defend a symbol of wisdom. Futile, perhaps, but somehow reassuring in a city marred by cruelty.
Thanks to Sarah Lane and the Post for giving us this dark but
revealing window on Washington.
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