Temple woman Jen Rheaume has taken her love of animals and channeled it into a career as the town Animal Control Officer and a pet supply business.
Customers who walk into her pet supply store, Temple Emporium, are welcomed with a cheery “Hello!” from the store’s unofficial greeter – an African Grey parrot named Scratch.
Scratch, along with his fellow birds of a feather Hugo and Muggins, aren’t for sale. They’re the unofficial mascots of the store, and the pets of Rheaume.
“These two have been our pets since the 90s,” Rheaume explains.
Scratch breaks in with an affirming “Yep,” as though he knows he’s being talked about, making Rheaume laugh. “They’re chatty.”
Hugo and Scratch have been her pets for decades, Rheaume said. Muggins is a more recent addition – a rescue who was recovered after being thrown into a dumpster.
Saving animals has become a second career for Rheaume – though luckily, she doesn’t keep many of them, she said. Rheaume opened the Temple Emporium in 1994. the Emporium sells pet supplies, fish and reptiles.
“I grew up with animals, and I always seemed to have a natural talent with them,” Rheaume said.
Her love of animals was so strong, she said, that a friend suggested she step up and fill Temple’s empty Animal Control Officer position seven years ago. At her friend’s urging she applied for the position and enrolled in animal control education courses in Concord.
“I’m on call 24/7,” Rheaume said. “I respond to lost pets, loose barnyard animals, sick wildlife, bats in people’s attics, whatever they need.”
In fact, only a few hours before, Rheaume said, she’d been called away from her shop to look for a dog that had been reported running loose in the road. The dog had been reunited with its owner – a happy ending, she said.
It’s not always that easy, she said. She’s had to respond to her share of animal neglect cases.
One of her most unusual cases was when a resident dropped off a ball python that had been apparently released and abandoned on a swamp near his property. The python would not have survived the winter, Rheaume said, because pythons are not a snake that go into hibernation.
“It was so cold, it couldn’t even move,” Rheaume said. “It was just curled into a hard ball.”
The python story has a happy ending, Rheaume said. She kept the snake and named her Rocky. The snake stays in Rheaume ’s home, which is attached to the shop, since most of her customers don’t find Rocky, who has grown “quite large,” as friendly as her three birds, she said.
Rheaume also responds to her fair share of wild animal calls. Even then, it’s possible to make a connection, she said. In the winter of 2015 the region was slammed with snowstorm after snowstorm, she said. Because of this juvenile bobcats, who were old enough to leave their mothers, but not quite full grown, struggled to hunt and survive. Rheaume said she herself had a set of undernourished bobcat siblings on her property.
For two weeks that winter, Rheaume said she put out uncooked chicken to assist the juveniles when hunting was at its worst. She said she was not setting a good example, and advised people against feeding wild animals, but said she could not bear to see the young bobcats starve to death. Rheaume said she kept a close eye on the bobcats and when she saw the weaker of the two actively hunting squirrels she cut off the food supply. She still sees the smaller of the pair in her yard occasionally, saying it has distinctive muddled spots she recognizes.
Those are the kinds of connections she likes to make with animals, Rheaume said – and the kinds of connections her job allows her to make.
“I think I can communicate with them pretty well. There’s a rapport there, that happens pretty quick – almost instantly,” Rheaume said. “There’s just something special about working with animals.”
Ashley Saari can be reached at 924-7172 ext. 244 or asaari@ledgertranscript.com. She’s on Twitter @AshleySaariMLT.