Cruel to an Animal? Not Guilty as Charged

No good deed ever goes unpunished.

--Attributed variously

to Oscar Wilde, Clare Boothe

Luce and Anonymous

Here is how I became a dog criminal.

One Tuesday afternoon, I called my condo from my office to pick up phone messages, and heard this:

“Mrs. Engle, this is the Department of Animal Regulation from the City of Los Angeles. You need to contact Lt. Diliberto at the West L.A. Animal Shelter concerning allegations of alleged animal cruelty. He will be in tomorrow from 8 until 4. And you may call either tomorrow, all the way until Friday. Or you can ask for Lt. Brown.

“Thank you. Have a nice day. There’ll be a notice posted in front of your building.”

We need some background here.

Several mornings a week, I hike into the hills above the Sunset Strip--past the homeless sleeping atop one another like puppies on a bus bench near Sunset Boulevard and Laurel Canyon Boulevard, past sleek BMWs and Mercedes panting mist and gliding toward offices bearing their cell phone-toting drivers, and finally up Crescent Heights Boulevard as it winds past million-dollar fantasy mansions.

I rarely see any people in the hills except a few lost drivers, a hiker or two and the gardeners. Few people speak or respond to greetings, except the unfailingly friendly gardeners, who offer shy smiles and carefully enunciated “good mornings.” The homeowners, after all, have paid plenty to enjoy their privacy.

But I do often meet a dog, an exuberant mixed breed that looks like a blend of German shepherd and golden retriever. She races up and down the steep street like an athlete--as open and trusting as the humans are wary. Sometimes we play catch with a found tennis ball. She lopes toward me, wagging her tail and licking my hand like I’m her owner.

That’s the problem.

She follows me home to my very busy, very unsafe street and won’t leave.

Once, I drove her to the pound, signing for first rights of adoption in case the owner didn’t come for her. She had no tag. The owner claimed her, tagged her and agreed to confine her. Later, when I spotted the dog through a screen door in the owner’s house on my hiking route, the owner’s daughter thanked me.

Lately, though, the dog has been getting out again. One day, I drove her back up to her home and let her out there.

I didn’t figure on a car that slowly cruised by as I let her go.

The next Tuesday night, after the Department of Animal Regulation call, I returned home to find a “Notice to Comply” taped to my door, informing me--and my neighbors--that I was to contact police regarding “an alleged animal cruelty violation of 597 California Penal Code.”

Jeez. Do they do this to murder suspects, I thought? Probably not. This, after all, is L.A.

“Do you drive a red Toyota?” said an Officer Page when I called the next day. Nope. Right color, wrong make. “Were you on La Cienega?” she asked. Nope, wrong road. But here’s the part they got right:

“Well, four witnesses said they saw you drop off a dog there.”

Thus, incredibly, I was accused of abandoning a pet. My accusers had carefully copied down my license plate, but they didn’t bother to ask me what I was doing. After all, this is Los Angeles and we prefer not to talk to strangers.

I gave Officer Page the phone number of the owner (which I had earlier copied from the dog’s tag) so that she could talk to him about the need to confine his dog and, as she put it to me, “clear your name.”

I suppose that many lessons could be drawn from this story concerning Los Angeles denizens: that we find it easier to care about (and care for) homeless pets than homeless people and that we assume the worst about each other.

But I prefer to imagine Raymond Chandler, our unofficial patron saint of noir, sipping a lonely drink somewhere and simply musing that “no good deed ever goes unpunished.”

Whoever said it first.