Observer photo by Julia Dahl
Humane Society Officer Chris Schindler gets a call that dogs were languishing in this yard. But when he gets there, he finds the animals clean and healthy. In about 10 years of working with animals, he has been bitten only once.

by JULIA DAHL

The white Suburban doesn’t look like much–its front bumper is half torn off, and the broken gas gauge always reads empty. The seats in the back are gone, replaced by piles of empty dog crates, capture poles, nets, canvas leashes and bags of dog food. Up front rides Humane Society Senior Officer Chris Schindler. It is 10 a.m. on a spectacularly sunny Tuesday, and his shift is just beginning.

Twenty years ago, Officer Schindler might have been called a dog catcher, a title that conjures up imagines of bumbling cartoon cops and wily junk yard dogs. Today, however, he is one of four Washington Humane Society officers who investigate the thousands of animal cruelty complaints submitted each year in the District.

Schindler, 27, rolls down the window and lights up a Newport. He’s a little disappointed. Someone has been hunting cats and raccoons with a bow and arrow in Southeast Washington and Schindler was hoping that when he got in this morning, there might have been a message on the anonymous tip line about the case.

“It’s really creepy,” he says, shaking his head as he recalls the cat one old woman brought in last Friday impaled by an arrow through its chest. Later that day he and another officer found half a dozen decomposing animals in a small wooded area, all killed the same way. “Every couple feet, we’d find another one,” he says.

Over the weekend he blanketed the area with flyers offering a $2,000 reward for information, and now he’s rolling through the neighborhood to make sure they’re still up.

“It’s probably a kid, and one of his buddies will turn him in for $2,000,” he says.

He’d like to investigate the case a bit–Schindler suspects the teenage son of a family that lives nearby–but he doesn’t have enough evidence for a search warrant, and besides, he has a stack of files on his dashboard, each representing an animal he needs to check up on. The first is a report filed the night before when a woman named Susie brought an emaciated cat that was covered in fleas to the Washington Humane Society office on Georgia Avenue. She surrendered the cat, and Schindler suspects she probably has several more in the same condition.

After three years covering the Southeast and Southwest Metro areas, Schindler knows the streets as well as any cabbie. He rolls up to a row of Section 8 housing and looks at the report. Susie left a street number, but no apartment or phone number.

“People leave fake or partial addresses all the time,” he says, and looks up her phone number. “But I know how to get around that.”

He hops out of his car, clipboard in hand, and heads to the apartment complex. At the entrance, two men and a woman sit smoking, laughing. The smell of marijuana rises around them. Officer Schindler doesn’t carry a weapon of any kind, but his blue uniform and gold badge make them straighten up as he approaches.

“Do any of you know which apartment Susie Tate is in?” he asks.

Observer photo by Julia Dahl

Schindler’s Chevy Suburban is his mobile office. He spends eight hours a day for five or six days a week taking calls, closing cases, issuing citations, helping pet owners build or maintain proper shelter for their animals, and removing dogs and cats from abusive or neglectful homes.

They all shake their heads. No matter. As soon as he steps in to the interior hallway, Schindler pulls out his cell phone and dials Tate’s number. Then, slowly, he walks up to each door and listens for the phone to ring. He finds her door in the basement, knocks several times, then writes out an official notice informing her to call the Humane Society, and sticks it in her door jam.

His next stop is in Anacostia, where he’s received a complaint of dogs penned in a filthy yard.

“This doesn’t look too bad,” he says as climbs up the stoop of a house. He knocks on the door, and a chorus of dogs bark from behind drawn shades.

“Who is it?” a voice asks from inside.

“This is Officer Schindler with the Humane Society,” he says.

The door opens and an old, toothless man with a wiry gray beard and long greasy hair peeks out. It is nearly 80 degrees outside, but the man is wearing a thick winter coat.

“We got a report about some dogs in poor condition,” says Schindler.

“Who said that?” says the man in a syrupy Southern accent.

“Can I just take a look inside real quick?”

The man opens the door wider, and two massive mixed-breeds, each easily more than 150 pounds, nose out.

“That one over there, she’s not doing too good,” says the man, pointing to another dog lying on the sofa. “Her legs actin’ funny. Like she got a pinched nerve or something. She’s real old though, ’bout 13.”

Schindler doesn’t see anything wrong with the animals, so he tells the man to take the dog to the Georgia Avenue shelter for free medical care. Schindler will check up in a few days, though.

“I always check back,” he says, opening a new pack of Newports. And indeed, for the next few hours, that’s what he does - going from house to house, squeezing the Suburban down trash-littered alleyways, whistling for dogs whose owners have been cited for one reason or another. He is their guardian, making sure they aren’t still on that short chain where he found them last week, or that their pen is no longer caked with urine and feces.

At an apartment near the Anacostia River he hops up on a discarded couch and peeks over a fence at some pit bulls who’d been chained together last week. They’re apart now, lounging in the sun.

“That makes me feel much better,” he says, and puts their file at the bottom of the pile.

Schindler has seen a lot in his almost 10 years working with animals–from his start cleaning kennels in Montgomery County to his current job as Washington’s senior humane officer. There was the dog whose owner duct taped its mouth shut and left it to die outside. And the house where the woman had 60 cats, all with herpes and chlamydia. The ammonia from the urine inside was so powerful that the fire department wouldn’t even go in. But Schindler, who used to bring injured rabbits and birds home as a child, stayed inside for hours, bringing the cats out one by one.

“I got pneumonia from the air in there,” he says, laughing. “Spent a week in the hospital.”

Schindler’s last stop before turning in the Suburban is the animal shelter on New York Avenue, where many of the animals he has rescued await adoption. As he walks past, the dogs all jump up, yelping and barking and clawing at the chain link fence that keeps them from him.

He offers his hand for them to lick, and he smiles.