City of Charlotte, NC Behind the Crown, 27 Apr 2023

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From YouTube: Looking Out for Pets with Charlotte Animal Care and Control Officer Jake Phillips

Description

“If you enjoy what you do, you don’t get tired of what you do.”

A lost dog along the highway; a tiger at a nightclub; a donkey in a Toyota Camry – Lead Animal Control Officer Jake Phillips has seen it all. With Animal Care and Control, Phillips is one of the team members who helps reconnect lost animals with their people and supports pet and animal rescue efforts during natural disasters and other emergencies. In this episode of Behind the Crown, we spend a day with Phillips as he travels to keep our four-legged friends safe.

Behind the Crown highlights the people who keep the City of Charlotte running. If you're interested in starting or extending a career in public service, explore opportunities with the City of Charlotte on our jobs board: https://cltgov.me/careers.

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A

Officer, Jake Phillips, with animal control and uh I'm a Lead Animal control officer and I've been here 20 years we have a large animal rescue team. We have an emergency response team. We have a HazMat team I'm on all of them. I also am assigned to work with Emergency Management when we have national natural disasters or anything that you know declared emergencies because everybody has pets. We've been deployed to the coast multiple times for hurricanes, basically to do that.

A

To do animal search and rescue okay looks like we'll go help officer, Guidry, there's a two stray dogs running near the highway, a lady caught one and there's still one running loose 485 at Mount, Holly, Road, I, really like it when we're able to bring an animal back home, that's been missing, I think the longest one that I personally had the dog had been loose for 56 days and it had gotten loose in Mint Hill, almost at 485., and we actually found it and caught it at the 277 interchange at downtown.

A

So it was 20 some odd miles away and 56 days later and that lady was she was crying so hard on the phone I couldn't tell if she understood that the dog, you know she could come get it.

A

Where's, you know where it comes back to I. Have a check here. Was that a player.

A

The number three we'll go: pull it up, see what we can find. So this one's got a chip, there's a second one that was running loose with it. That went that way, but we'll see if we can look up the Chip And, maybe the other one ran home where we could find an owner there. We go.

A

That's Joe, Mr, wood.

A

How you doing you Mr wood, yeah, Jake, Phillips, Animal, Control nice, to meet you, so we got one Stacks, there's a second one that went that way, but he probably was headed back toward the house. Do it you got busted buddy.

A

That's basically a perfect, uh perfect setup right there. Oh, it feels great. um You know it's people always Overjoyed to get their pets back and you know so they're really excited when when we can call them and tell them hey we've picked your dog up and it's safe. You know we can bring it home to you.

A

Honestly, everybody wants to pet raccoons and they are usually not friendly at all and when you snuggle up with a baby raccoon, it's a rabies. Exposure makes a great selfie, but but it is not smart to be nuzzling with rabies Vector species, even if they're cute, you know, I've had weird 20 years worth of weird stuff. um We had a baby elephant, get loose off a circus train years ago when they used to walk in on Tryon.

A

You know we had the tiger calls. We've had multiple alligator calls over the years. I personally have had a tiger call about 15 years ago, a guy brought it to a club to pick up girls with, and we had to run him off. It's always something.

A

um 10 years ago we caught we caught two donkeys and we were getting ready to bring a trailer out, and a car full of young ladies shows up in a Camry, and they just took him and put them in the back of their car and rolled the window down. So he could stick his head out and off they went. I was like okay, it's your donkey. The truth is Stranger Than Fiction out here.

A

uh Good afternoon this officer Phillips over Animal Control calling for Chris and y'all called about a cat. Oh okay, I see a mama cat up on. The curb is that the one yeah.

A

You got a buddy down there or what.

A

Kitty kitty actually don't see or hear anything down there. You see how see how he's already hanging out they will. They will jump down and jump back up. They can be six feet deep and they'll still uh they can still get out.

A

I wonder if it was him that was down there.

A

We do a lot of chasing our tail on a job where we're chasing things with Tails, and you know, of course, the one that you you know you downplay is the one that turns out to be a mess when you get there I like working here, but this is just it's different I enjoy it and you know, if you enjoy what you do, then you don't get tired of what you do.

A