Criminal - Dog in the Bed, Cat in the Bag, Camel on the Golf Course

Episode Date: December 16, 2022

Stories of animals really going for it. Say hello on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. Sign up for our occasional newsletter, The Accomplice. Follow the show and review us on Apple Podcasts: Apple.co/CriminalShow. Listen back through our archives at youtube.com/criminalpodcast. We also make This is Love and Phoebe Reads a Mystery. Artwork by Julienne Alexander. Check out our online shop.  Episode transcripts are posted on our website. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Support for Criminal comes from Apple Podcasts. Each month, Apple Podcasts highlights one series worth your attention, and they call these series essentials. This month, they recommend Wondery's Ghost Story, a seven-part series that follows journalist Tristan Redman as he tries to get to the bottom of a ghostly presence in his childhood home. His investigation takes him on a journey involving homicide detectives, ghost hunters, and even psychic mediums,

and leads him to a dark secret about his own family. Check out Ghost Story, a series essential pick, completely ad-free on Apple Podcasts. Botox Cosmetic, Adabotulinum Toxin A, FDA approved for over 20 years. So, talk to your specialist to see if Botox Cosmetic is right for you. For full prescribing information, including boxed warning, visit BotoxCosmetic.com or call 877-351-0300. Remember to ask for Botox Cosmetic by name. To see for yourself and learn more, visit BotoxCosmetic.com. That's BotoxCosmetic.com. My house is toddler-proofed because of Carlton.

Carlton is three years old. He can open most cabinets, refrigerators, his bedroom door. He has opened my front door and the front fence and let himself and the dogs out previously. So most anything that I don't want opened has to have some kind of additional latch. How does a pig open and close a door? With their snout? Is their nose involved? With their snout. Yeah. If they can hook the ledge of their little snout under it, they can move or open anything. For a while before I figured out how to secure the door on his bedroom, I would come downstairs in the morning and there would be half-eaten melons and fruit all over the kitchen floor. And I couldn't figure it out. So I set up a camera, and he was actually opening, he was letting himself out of his room overnight,

opening the fridge, eating what he wanted, closing the fridge, and then putting himself back in his room. So he's pretty food-motivated. Very food-motivated. They have 15,000 taste buds, So food is extremely rewarding for pigs. In 2019, Amanda Quick adopted a pig named Carlton through the Central Texas Pig Rescue. For someone who doesn't know what it's like to have a pet pig, is it kind of, would you just, is it kind of like having a pet dog in many respects?

It's like a dog in that they are house trained and leash trained and those sorts of things. It's not like a dog in the amount of activity that they need or the wear and tear on your house. So the best way that I describe determining if you would like to adopt a pig to people or not is if you do not mind patching holes in your drywall, and if you do not mind your yard being completely destroyed, then you might be a good fit for a pig. What's the difference between training a dog and training a pig? Pigs are smarter. So pigs test with the same cognitive function as a three-year-old human child. So it has to be appealing, kind of like you would make learning for a toddler.

If at any point it's not fun or interesting for them, they would rather go do their own thing. What does he spend his time doing? So he's spoiled. Carlton has his own room, so he has puzzles and toys that hang from the ceiling and balls that dispense treats that he can play with in there. And he has, obviously, an orthopedic bed, but they don't nap a lot. They're active about seven.

What do you mean, obviously, an orthopedic bed? I guess that's just him being spoiled. We use a specific brand of bed just to make sure he's comfortable. I was a vet tech for almost 15 years. And so for me, I think every pet should be sleeping on an orthopedic bed. But yeah, so they're active about 75% of every 24 hours. So that's a key difference between pigs and dogs. They don't nap that frequently, and they really like to be outdoors. It's never a good fit for someone who wants an indoor-only pig.

They have to root. It's a really natural activity, and that's probably what they spend the majority of their time doing. So he comes inside and out, but he has a baby pool and a splash pad, and he actually has a little cart that he rides in behind my bicycle. Every day, Amanda also takes Carlton for a three-mile walk. The first October she had him, she noticed whenever they passed a pumpkin on someone's porch, Carlton would pull on his leash. And then, one day when he was playing in the yard,

Amanda came out to check on him and found him with a half-eaten jack-o'-lantern. And only the face of it was gone. He had just eaten the part that somebody had worked really hard on and left the rest. Amanda says she looked on the sidewalk in front of her house and saw a trail of tea lights and pumpkin seeds. It led her to a house a few doors down. The man who lived there said he'd carved a jack-o'-lantern the night before,

but now it was missing. Amanda told him she thought it could be her pig and that he'd eaten it. And now she had to figure out how Carlton had managed to get to the pumpkin in the first place. So the front yard has a very small fence and what I realized really quickly that he was going to be able to get out of it. So I started putting him in a harness with kind of a tie out to a big tree in the yard and the fence. And he would take his harness completely off and then hop over the small fence and leave. And he'd always come back.

Oh, yeah. He's gotten me even, I'd say, two or three times since then, even with everything being doubly secure, where I've gone out front and he's been standing there completely naked of his harness. And I have no idea if he's left and come back or if he just wanted to be out there without his harness on for a while and didn't leave. So he's never stayed gone though. Every time I've opened the door, he's been here.

I only know that he left because of the pumpkins. Have you watched him take his own harness off? I've never seen it. I don't know how he does it. Amanda's neighbors started sending her videos from their doorbell cameras of her pig taking their pumpkins. You'll see him go up on people's porch and then use his nose to roll the pumpkin down the stairs and then kind of out in their yard. And he doesn't always have the self-control to bring the whole thing home. Some of them he's eating their pumpkins on their porch or eating half of them and then dragging part of it home. But her neighbors don't seem to mind. People love to watch him eat pumpkins. They love it.

So once they realized that he would, there were neighbors that were kind of jealous that he had not come to their house. They were watching their camera at night hoping Carlton would come steal their pumpkins. And so when he didn't, we started getting messages from people asking, like, hey, can we bring him a pumpkin and then watch him eat it? And so then some mornings I would open my front door, and there would be, like, ten pumpkins on the porch. Like, someone had just made a delivery overnight,

and he would have this whole stash of pumpkins when he woke up. She says he spreads the pumpkins all over the yard and that there have been so many over the last few years that the seeds started to sprout. The last couple years my front yard is just a pumpkin patch. It sprouts up a ton of plants and I have, I don't know, probably 200 pumpkins growing in my yard right now. Oh my, it's paradise. I'll never leave again. Amanda bought a deep freezer to store the pumpkins. And eventually, she started an annual drive to donate leftover jack-o'-lanterns to the Central Texas Pig Rescue, where she got Carlton. Last December, we brought you a special episode of Stories About Animals,

including a story about my childhood cat sneaking into my father's car and going on a ride to the airport, a beaver in Dollar General, and a fox stealing shoes. Most of them were plastic shoes, like flip-flops or these kind of garden shoes. We called them crocs. They were quite colorful, so it seems it was a fashion fox. We started the episode with one of my favorite things I've ever read,

from the New York Times in 1908. It told the story of a large dog, a Newfoundland, who saved a small child who'd fallen into a river outside of Paris. The dog's reward was a steak. And then, two days later, another kid fell in the river. The dog rescued that one, too, and got another steak. It happened again and again, and eventually it became clear that the dog was pushing kids into the water to get the steaks. The headline was, Dog, a Fake Hero. It seemed like people liked the episode last year,

so we thought we'd make another one. I'm Phoebe Judge. This is Criminal. We'll be right back. Support for Criminal comes from Apple Podcasts. Thank you. seven-part series that follows journalist Tristan Redman as he tries to get to the bottom of a ghostly presence in his childhood home. His investigation takes him on a journey involving homicide detectives, ghost hunters, and even psychic mediums, and leads him to a dark secret about his own family. Check out Ghost Story, a series essential pick,

completely ad-free on Apple Podcasts. We are joined by Kylie Robeson, the senior AI reporter for The Verge, to give you a primer on how to integrate AI into your life. So, tune into AI Basics, How and When to Use AI, a special series from Pivot sponsored by AWS, wherever you get your podcasts. Last month, a man traveling from New York to Florida checked his suitcase at JFK in New York. When the bag went through the x-ray, the screener noticed something odd on the screen. They pulled the bag. And then they noticed a tiny bit of orange fur sticking out of the zipper. There's a photo of the moment they opened the bag. Inside you can see an orange cat curled up,

alive, totally unhurt. The TSA officer was shocked. It took some time to figure out what had happened. The man who had checked the bag did not own this cat. He had been visiting a friend, staying in a house where one of the roommates had a cat. As far as anyone can tell, when he was packing up to leave, the cat must have snuck into a suitcase.

The cat's name was Smells. Smells was safely reunited with his family. His owner said the cat, quote, doesn't seem phased at all. And a few days later, she posted a video of Smells trying to crawl into another suitcase. David Ishihara is the Director of Aviation Services at Logan Airport in Boston. He says you never know what's going to come through a TSA checkpoint. So, for example, there were a few doctors who were flying out for a conference. Everything was pretty routine.

But on a secondary search of a bag, the TSA screeners found human organs in the checked bag. Did they have ice? Were these in the bag? I don't know how it was actually packed, Phoebe, but when they opened the bag to do the search and there are organs, normally ships these things by a cargo carrier, but it was a bag with five heads in it. So when the screeners found that, they called the state police and they located the passenger who was in the hold room waiting for his flight to depart. And he came downstairs and he said, well, I have another bag with seven heads in it, just so you know. Were they skulls or were these real? No, these were cadaver heads. There was hair on them?

Yeah, it was hair. When you have 120,000 passengers a day and a quarter million bags, and we've got dozens of airlines, and it's a very dynamic environment. And I would say this was probably three weeks ago. I was walking through a terminal, and one of our airport supervisors stopped. And a woman was arriving, and she had eight cats. Eight cats? Eight cats. And when she got the bag claim, she let them out because they had been cooped up in their carriers. So there were eight cats wandering around bag claim. Were they on leashes? Were they on little leashes? No, they were unleashed. And fortunately, they were fairly tame and didn't scatter because cats can be pretty unpredictable, I think.

So he asked her if she could put them away and said they've been on a flight and she needed to let them out. And eventually, she herded the cats and put them back know, for us, the concern is that a couple of things, that other passengers may not be completely comfortable with that. And then there are baggage carousels. There are doors that lead to the airfield. And then you're just one door away from a fairly busy roadway. So things can get out of control pretty quick if they're not controlled and managed. This past June, David got an email from an airline worker So things can get out of control pretty quick if they're not controlled and managed.

This past June, David got an email from an airline worker saying that a cat had gotten out of its cage as it was being offloaded from the plane. And by all accounts from witnesses, it ran into the terminal through an open baggage belt door. David learned that the cat's name was Rowdy, and she had arrived on a flight with her family from Germany. She had been traveling underneath the plane in the cargo area. While she was being unloaded, Rowdy had managed to escape her carrier and had run into a terminal.

They had no idea where she was. Once we identified the door that Rowdy ran through, we knew where it led, and it was basically into, I would call it, I would describe it as crawl space in Terminal E. So underneath in the non-public area where all the baggage belt systems are located, and there's some storage down there, it's like a basement. Once we identified where that door led and we could sort of give ourselves an idea of where we need to start looking, we have wildlife technicians on staff because we have a major airfield to run. And part of the management of that airfield includes a wildlife management program. So we called the wildlife techs and they responded with their

have a heart traps and game cameras. And we set them up in the crawl space of terminal E just to see if we could find Rowdy, get eyes on the cat, just to confirm that he's still there and reachable. And the people who work down there. So there are a lot of technicians who actually work in this area, even overnight. So we had people working the overnight who actually would call us in the morning to say, we saw Rowdy. So people were saying, I saw a black cat. I saw Rowdy running. I couldn't get Rowdy. Yes. Yep. Yep. You really can't chase them. And even if you could, Rowdy is going to run places where a human cannot go. And we didn't want to spook him. We didn't want him to run out of the building. If we knew he was there, we wanted to keep him there and get him into one of these Havahart traps.

What type of food did you put in the trap? Tuna, I believe, actually. And we started getting pictures of Rowdy at night on the game cameras. And we had a nice picture where he sort of walked up to the camera and looked in it. So it was confirmation that he looked healthy and was alive and well. We just needed to get her into a cage. You know, Logan has a lot of seafood restaurants. Good point. I would think this would be a lot of seafood restaurants. Good point. I would think this would be a good place for a cat to land.

There's illegal seafoods right upstairs. We should have thought of that. That's right. At this point, everybody who worked at the airport was looking for the cat. Local news outlets all over Boston picked up the story of the missing cat at Logan, which meant that even passengers were on the lookout. Did you try different types of strategies, different types of foods in the trap?

We did. We tried different locations. We'd move it around, except for the traps where Roddy was coming up and having her picture taken because we knew she was comfortable in that location, but we moved the traps around. Finally, the gentleman who runs the facilities and maintenance operation, he has a cat, and they have and grow organic catnip. And he said, I'm going to bring some in and just try it. And he did that night when he put the catnip in the trap is the night we caught Rowdy. Really? Rowdy wanted the catnip? Have you ever seen a cat with catnip?

I haven't. Oh, you really should. I asked Bill, I said, what happens? And he described it. And I said, okay. They go wild. They go crazy. Absolutely, yeah. So it was the catnip that finally got Rowdy in the trap. That's it.

You know, this is a busy time of year for traveling, the busiest time of the year. I assume there's a lot of pets that are going to be passing through Logan in the next couple of weeks. Yes. You might want to carry a little catnip in your pocket for the next few weeks. You know, now that you've said that, I probably have to. Tell me about your dogs. Well, right now we only have two dogs.

We have Hollis Hill, the hound. He is a black and tan red bone mix that I took in off the streets in 2015. And then we also have Jupiter Arrow, who is a golden mix that we adopted from a friend whose dog unexpectedly had a litter of puppies. I haven't met many people who, many dogs who have two names. Ah, all of our dogs have always had two names all the time.

This is Jimmy Johnson. He and his wife, Julie, and their dogs live in Benton, Tennessee. Julie and Jimmy are both whitewater rafting guides on the Ocoee River. Julie runs a bar in town, and Jimmy works there too. One night this past spring, they'd both been working and got home pretty late. Before they went to bed, Jimmy let their dogs out. This was when they had three dogs, Hollis Hill, Jupiter Arrow,

and a poodle named Zeppelin Blue. And then Jimmy, Julie, and the three dogs went to bed. The dogs were allowed to sleep in the bed, but usually only two of them did. So, like any other night, we went to bed, and then I woke up. I want to say it was around four in the morning. It was raining hard. We have a tin roof, so it's always a nice sound to hear the heavy rain, but it was also thundering. Jimmy says he had one dog on either side of him and another dog at his feet.

Our dog, Hollis, doesn't spend so much time in the bed unless it's raining hard and thundering, so I didn't think anything of feeling another dog in the bed. And I, you know, through a few blinks, look down to my side and realize that the dog that was in the bed was not ours. What did you, what did you, did you, did you wake Julie up? What did, what was your first reaction? So I did. I think I hit her kind of in her ribs with an elbow and said, hey, Julie, whose dog is this? And of course, she is asleep and she wakes up and I don't remember exactly what she said, but she thought that it was one of our dogs. And I said again, this dog does not belong to us. Whose dog is this? And Julie hopped up and flipped on the light and there's laying a beautiful 80 pound pit bull with jowls the size of a tiger,

just laying there in the bed with us. Were you scared at first? I think I would, I think I would have screamed. I was scared. There was a three to five second window of time there before I realized that the dog wasn't going to eat me. And what happened during that three to five second window was that I tried to pull the covers up over my chest and my face and kind of scoot away from the dog in the bed. And the further I scooted and the harder I pulled, the harder the dog snuggled right into me. And I'll be honest with you, we had had a long weekend on the river, you know, rafting for 12 hours a day and then working several hours later in the evening at the bar and the restaurant. So once I realized this dog wasn't going to eat us alive, I just

cuddled up with it and went back to sleep. You just thought we'll take care of it in the morning? Absolutely. I was exhausted. It was 4 a.m., you know, the rain is pouring down, the thunder's banging. You know, I didn't think that there was anything that could be done about it quickly enough to negate me getting up from my restful slumber to try to address it then. In the morning, Julie woke up before Jimmy. She saw that their front door was open. It must not have been pulled all the way shut the night before.

If our door doesn't shut all the way, it pushes itself back open a little bit, and then our dogs can use their snouts, and they open it and come and go as they please until we shut it. Julie posted about the dog on social media. You know, hey, funny story, we woke up with this dog in our bed. Does anybody recognize it? Are you missing your dog? So it didn't take long before somebody commented and said, oh my goodness, I'm so sorry, that's our dog. We'll come and get her. A woman arrived and said her dog Nala had gotten away the night before when she was on a walk. And where Nala ran off from was about two miles, actually, from where we live. And so Nala was probably romping and having the time of her life. The

thunderstorm rolled in late that night, and, you know, whether she just saw our porch light and thought that it was inviting, I don't know if our dogs met her outside on the porch and invited her in or if they met in the living room and, you know, sniffed each other and realized, hey, it's thunder and let's get in the bed. Did you ever see Nala again? I did. My wife and I arranged a play date for Nala and her mothers to come back over the next week. And we had treats and we had vanilla ice cream and we stood around and we threw sticks and balls and chatted and had a great time getting to know Nala and her parents better. Did Nala try to get back in that bed? No, she didn't. She did go in the house while she was there.

And, of course, to her mother's call, came right back out. Do you think that, you know, they say that people's lives are better with dogs. Dog owners are happier. They're more physically fit. They're more active. Do you think that there's a great benefit to your life by sleeping with dogs and by owning dogs? I absolutely do. I think that dogs are a man's best friend. And I think that society would be much better off if everyone could share the companionship of an

animal, whether it's a dog or a cat or a bearded dragon or a horse. You know, I think that relationships between humans and cows could be cultivated much more than they are. I think that as living creatures on the earth, we are connected with all other living creatures and that when we can recognize and appreciate that, we are better people for it. We'll be right back. Thank you. According to Noom, losing weight has less to do with discipline and more to do with psychology. Noom is the weight loss management program that focuses on the science behind food cravings and building sustainable eating habits. Noom wants to help you stay focused on what's important to you with their psychology and biology-based approach. Noom takes into account your unique biological factors, which also affect weight loss success. The program can also help you

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Yes, this is Robbie. Hi, Robbie. It's Phoebe. How are you? I'm fine. Robbie Farrenbaugh has lived in Panama City, Florida, for over 30 years. And we're enjoying gorgeous weather today. Perfect temperature, sun's shiny. We had just the right amount of rain last night. So it's a good day.

One of Robbie and her partner Ellen's favorite things to do in the evening is to sit on the deck and watch the sun go down. They do it all the time. But one night, they turned the deck lights on, and they weren't working. So we continued and enjoyed our evening. I checked it the next day, and I went to the big problem first. I ran through all the wiring and no issues, and then I looked up and realized there's not a light bulb in there. And they weren't all missing.

Just about two or three of them were missing. But it was all in one little, the corner part of the deck. And so I thought, well, that's kind of weird. And didn't think a whole lot of it. And so I went and got some more light bulbs, popped them in there. And, you know, a night or two later, we're out there, and it's like, the lights are gone again. Now, this is getting kind of creepy, so Ellen and I were like, kind of made the hair on the back of our neck rise, and so, of course, our immediate jump to conclusion is that somebody's up here and doesn't want to be seen,

so they're pulling these light bulbs out. Here's Robbie's partner, Ellen. And without telling you my age, I've been reading those Nancy Drew books since I was a little girl in the 50s. And so, of course, we went to the worst possible conclusion. We thought maybe they were kind of casing the house and trying to get it dark. So it kind of scared us a little bit. So I said, all right, here's what we're going to do. I'm going to, we don't want to call the police or anything on that. There's no proof of anything. So I went and got on amazon.com and got me a

little game camera. And then I went and bought another pack of bulbs and we popped those back in there after I'd kind of played around with the camera a little bit with my pets and stuff and saw that, okay, set it up this way to get pictures and all that kind of stuff. I took it down there and wrapped it around the pole real good. And we were trying to be really careful because we thought if this is somebody that's up here up to no good, I don't want them stealing my camera. So we wrapped it really tight and kind of put it down towards the floor of the deck so that it might not be seen. And so we thought, this will probably take us, you know, several nights before we catch anything.

And we go to bed. Next day, I think we were busy. I thought, oh, I've got to go get the camera and see if we caught anything. So I go and get the camera, and I sit down, and I'm listening to the pictures. I'm like, oh, my gosh. I can't believe it. I was like, what, what, what? We caught him.

We caught him. First night, we caught him. And it was a raccoon. The little guy was kind of what I remember. He was kind of sitting on his haunches with one of his paws, his front paw, which we're calling his little arm, reaching up under the deck seat and reaching that treasure to the best of his little ability. And it caught him. It nabbed him in the act is what it did.

You couldn't have asked for a better shot to know exactly what he was doing. Otherwise, we would have thought, oh, there's a raccoon on the deck, big deal. But he literally had the bulb in his hand. Well, I'm looking at the picture right now, and it kind of even looks like the raccoon is starting to do a little twist of the bulb that you would need to take it out. Yes, exactly. Perfect, perfect. I don't think we give them enough credit. They're little thieves around here.

They've stolen all sorts of things off of our back porch. Oh, really? What other things? Oh, goodness. We have cats. And so we had a five-gallon metal trash can that held the cat food. Well, there was one night I'm in bed, and after 11 o'clock, I think, and I'm hearing all this commotion, and I go out, and I hadn't gone outside yet. I'm looking out the back door, and I look down the path out the back way, and there's a raccoon still pulling that entire can, full can.

Those are 16-pound bags of cat food, pulling it down the backyard trail because he couldn't get it open. So he had pulled it down the steps of the porch, around the porch, and down the trail to, I guess, his buddies who were going to help him get it open. I don't know. And, of course, I'm not going to chase after a raccoon or anything, but I just kind of banged on the porch frame and said, excuse me, I think that's mine, not yours. And he just looked back at me and, huh, dropped the handle and went on. Was the raccoon dragging it with its arm? Yeah. Was the raccoon dragging it with its arm? Yeah, he had, you know, I guess if you, they're legs, but the tops, I would call an arm.

He was pulling along with one arm. So they're strong little guys. Robbie and Alan have installed new LED lights on the deck. No bulbs required. So it was just a normal Sunday morning and one call came in initially of a golfer on our golf course here in town saying that he saw a camel on the golf course. Last December, when police officer Kyle Rector heard a camel had been spotted in Bonner Springs, Kansas, he didn't really believe it. And everybody just kind of dismissed it,

saying, well, we're going to go check it out, but it's probably obviously some kind of confusion. I know that there's a farm that not too far away has llamas, alpacas. I was pretty sure one of those had gotten out and the guy maybe just got confused. So we went there, circling the area. When the officers got there, they saw someone driving around in circles with an empty trailer. They said they were looking for their camel. That's when we found out that it was a camel, a legitimate camel. Officer Kyle Rector learned that the camel had been part of a live drive-through Christmas nativity scene

at the National Agricultural Hall of Fame in Bonner Springs. The camel had escaped when its halter broke. By the time the police were notified, the camel had been loose all night. Kendra Anthony, an animal control officer, was called to the scene. Kendra and the other officers began their search at the golf course, where the camel had last been spotted. They asked if they could borrow some golf carts. They didn't see the camel anywhere. Officer Kyle Rector started driving up and down roads nearby. I saw it immediately in a field.

It was hard to miss. I mean, talking about maybe a 12- or 15-foot camel just kind of standing on this hilltop, it was very easy to spot. So myself and another officer pulled into that field and tried to approach it. The camel wanted obviously nothing to do with us and kind of ran through. And our biggest fear was that the camel was going to wind up on Interstate 70, which runs through our city as well, which would have been a bad situation for the camel and drivers on the road.

The next call came in the early afternoon. The camel had been spotted on the main highway in town, moving quickly. Were you still in the golf cart at this point? No, no. The golf cart was just a short-lived little thing just to check the perimeter. Animal Control Officer Kendra Anthony. And the camel was running down the highway. Yeah.

I remember driving up K7, which is a four-lane busy highway, up over the hill, and all I could see was a camel coming in the opposite direction with both lanes of cars just kind of trailing behind it. It was running just right with traffic. There's videos of the camel on the highway. All the cars around it have slowed down to a near stop, and it's just trotting down the middle of the road. One of the videos was later uploaded to YouTube,

and someone commented, This camel has road skills better than some people, stayed in the middle of the lane, and didn't cut anyone off. So you see the camel. What do you do next? I kind of turned off to try to get in front of her to catch her. I didn't get there in enough time, and she ran right by me. And then she kind of veered off the highway and went into a residential area. I mean, I know you probably have tools for catching dogs and birds and cats,

but what did you have with you that you could even begin to think, I can get a camel? I actually had a lariat rope to lap over. My captain had actually given me that. And I practiced, you know, here and there thinking maybe I'd use it to catch a dog or a horse or something like that, but never imagined I'd use it for a camel. So the best plan you had was that you'd lasso it? Yes. Once we were off the highway, she kind of ran down a residential road and then veered off into some backyards. And that's where we were kind of able to get her cornered.

She went into a backyard that had, I think, fences on two or three sides. So once she was kind of cornered in that area, I was able to jump out with the lasso. And I got the lasso around her neck, tied it off to a tree, and then she was effectively caught at that point. Did it take a couple of times to lasso her? It was actually the first try. The first try? You're good. I mean, I guess in that situation I was, yeah. Kendra Anthony notified Kyle Rector and the other officers. And so by the time

we showed up, we went to the backyard of the house and there was Kendra, there was the camel, lassoed to a tree. And I thought, well, this isn't going to get any weirder. We all were kind of just trying not to get trampled because, I mean, she kept bringing her front feet off the ground and kind of stomping back and forth. One of the owners was there. Afterwards, we found out that the more you feed a camel, the more it calms down. So we all kind of took turns trying to pet it, feed it, little snacks that they had for it. The camels, like much of us, I think, will start to relax once we get fed. We don't get as angry or grumpy.

And that's what happened with her. She turned into being a real sweet camel. Have you ever heard this word some people use? I think it's hangry. Yeah. Do you think that might have been what was going on? Probably. I would assume.

I'd probably be a little hangry myself. When you were feeding her, you were feeding her little, like, camel snacks? Apple biscuits is what they were called. Apple biscuits. Is it camel food or is it real food, people food? I was just giving them. The lady just said, here, these are apple biscuits. She loves them. And I didn't really read the package to see if they had a camel on them or not, but she loved them. And then she started kind of being a little trickster and she would spit them out at me and I'd give them back to her.

I mean, it was kind of fun. She kind of developed her own little personality after she got out of her bad mood, and she really kind of had, like, a sweet personality where I was kind of sad to see her go. Officer Kyle Rector says he hopes he sees the camel, whose name is Lucy, again sometime. I don't know if Kendra necessarily agrees with me, but I liked her. I thought she was a sweet camel. Regardless of this, she tried to stomp me a couple times, but if she is coming back to town,

I would definitely come and make sure that her pen was secure, for one, and then ask her how she's been doing and maybe give her another apple biscuit. Well, I hope you have a really nice holiday. Oh, thanks. You too. Thank you, Phoebe. Okay. Bye-bye.

Bye. Thanks very much for listening this year. It means an awful lot to all of us. Happy New Year. We'll see you soon. Criminal is created by Lauren Spohr and me. Nadia Wilson is our senior producer. Katie Bishop is our supervising producer. Our producers are Susanna Robertson, Jackie Sajico, Libby Foster, Lily Clark, Megan

Kinane, and Samantha Brown. Our technical directors are all buyers. Engineering by Russ Henry. Julian Alexander makes original illustrations for each episode of Criminal. You can see them at thisiscriminal.com. If you have a story about an animal or a pet that you think we should know about, send us an email. Hello at thisiscriminal.com. And if you like the show, tell a friend or leave us a review. It means a lot. We're on Facebook and Twitter at Criminal Show and Instagram at criminal underscore podcast. And we're on TikTok at criminal underscore podcast, where we're posting some behind-the-scenes content. We're also on YouTube, where you can go back and take a listen to some of our favorite past episodes.

That's at youtube.com slash criminal podcast. Criminal is recorded in the studios of North Carolina Public Radio, WUNC. We're part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. Discover more great shows at podcast.voxmedia.com. I'm Phoebe Judge. This is Criminal. The number one selling product of its kind with over 20 years of research and innovation. Botox Cosmetic, Adabotulinum Toxin A, is a prescription medicine used to temporarily make moderate to severe frown lines, crow's feet, and forehead lines look better in adults. Effects of Botox Cosmetic may spread hours to weeks after injection causing serious symptoms.

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