Most people when they were kids probably rode their bike to get to a friend's house, but not Madison Animal Control Officer (ACO) Liz Amendola. She rode her pony.

“I use to ride my pony like a bicycle in my neighborhood,” she says. “I would ride the pony to my friends house and it would graze in the back yard while I was inside playing. Then I’d get back on and ride her home.”

It’s safe to say animals have always played a large role in Liz’s life. Growing up on Long Island, she was a horse show kid who had a knack for bringing home any stray animal she could find—everything from bunnies to dogs. In college, she got a degree in equine science and farm management and then spent the next 25 years teaching riding both on Long Island and then here in Connecticut. While she loved teaching, life started to take her career in a different direction.

“I had my three children and I had them pretty close together, so by the time I got to my third child, I was at horse shows with a newborn hanging in the front of me, a little one on my back, someone in a carriage and it just got to be a lot, teaching and showing with the three kids,” she says. “I started to look for something a little different to do.”

Liz moved to Madison about 16 years ago and eventually took a position as a part-time ACO with the town. Just last year, Liz became the full-time ACO in Madison.

Years ago and ACO was known as a dog warden, but over the years the job has grown to include a wider range of responsibilities. Liz said she is still in charge of things like domestic animal issues, missing pets, and dog licensing, but now the job also includes a lot of wildlife calls.

No Lions, No Tigers; Yes Bears

As the ACO, Liz fields a lot of calls for orphaned or injured wildlife, reports of a skunk or squirrel in someone’s home, and the occasional bear or coyote sighting.

“Right now it’s bear season so the bears are lumbering around,” she said. “They basically are just looking for food and sometimes they take an occasional dip in a swimming pool. That’s not uncommon, so I am fielding a lot of calls for bears. I have heard of them going in people’s pools and getting in the hammock, popping pool toys and that sort of thing.”

While those kinds of sightings are amusing or terrifying depending on how you look at it, Liz said one of the best parts of dealing with wildlife is helping people understand how to live with the animals in the area.

“To me, I love the wildlife calls because to me it is really a privilege to be able to assist wildlife and also educate residents about ways to humanely solve nuisance wildlife issues,” she said. “It’s really satisfying to teach people how you can co-exist peacefully with the wildlife in the area. I always say we are not the only species on the planet. We can all be here, but sometimes you just have to make some adjustments.”

Typical advice generally includes showing people how to re-arrange some things on their property so garbage isn’t easy to access and bears can’t get at the grease trap on a grill, and how to humanely evict animals that might have decided to move in under someone’s deck.

When wildlife ends up in someone’s home, it often makes for a funny story. Liz said she once went out on a report of a possum in someone’s living room. How did it get there? A dog was chasing the possum, the possum played possum, then the dog picked it up and brought it in the house, only for the dog and homeowner to realize that the possum was very much alive. The story had a happy ending, though, when Liz was able to calmly remove the possum from the home.

“I like to take more time when I have to remove a wild animal from a house because the animal doesn’t want to be there,” she says. “It’s scared, so I try to take the path of least resistance when removing wildlife from a house. I am not big on dragging things out on catchpoles and if I can do it in a humane way it may take longer, but that is typically my way.”

Liz has found herself in a manhole looking for a puppy only to discover it was actually a family of fox, walking a runaway horse from home to home in North Madison to try to find its owner, under a deck with only a foot of clearance trying to grab a cat, searching on the Hammonasset connector late at night in her pajamas looking for a missing dog, and going on calls with a baby skunk as her sidekick. Yes really.

“There was a dead skunk, a mom, on the side of the road so there was a baby there and it was staying with the mom,” she says. “It was a very young baby so I put it in my small animal carrier and I had it on the front seat next to me in my animal control vehicle and then I went on a couple calls, so it sort of road shotgun with me. I had it for a few hours and then I went home and I was waiting for a spot with the rehabilitator, so I had the skunk with me for a couple days and was taking care of it. Then the rehabilitator called me and said, ‘OK, I can take the skunk now,’ so I drove it in my own car next to me on the seat. I had never been sprayed once by the skunk and I got there and I let the skunk out and it sprayed the rehabilitator and everyone around her. I had thought the skunk was too young to spray, but she said, ‘Oh no.’”

A Passion First, a Job Second

Liz said her husband says she is a bit like Dr. Dolittle because animals just seem to come her way, but a lot it has to do with just how much she cares. Liz said she loses sleep if a dog is missing overnight and is heavily involved with trying to reunite owners with their lost pets.

“It’s probably one of my favorite pars of the job, being able to reunite people with a lost pet,” she says. “Facebook is fantastic for that. I have a lot of followers and I depend on them—I put it out there, they share it, and really most times now it’s the way I am able to locate owners. People recognize dogs and they share it and make the match.”

Liz has more than 1,000 followers on her Facebook page being able to re-unite pets and owners is one of the best feelings in the world, and part of the reason why she doesn’t really view her role as ACO as a job per se.

“It’s a job certainly, but I really don’t think of it as a job,” she says. “It’s who I am and it’s what I do…You just never know what is going to happen each day and that’s why I love this job.”