Jake Bacon Saves Wild Animals Until One Threatens His Life

Jake Bacon has made it his mission to help the helpless. He rescues wild animals. When we spoke he and his daughter were caring for a skunk, a fox, a squirrel and a bunny -- all babies, all either injured or orphaned in some form or another. 

MORALES: Oh my goodness JAKE BACON: This is a very fat skunk that is entirely capable of spraying. And so laying on her back with her rear legs spread indelicately wide and her bum pointing straight at me. If we do years of skunk rescue sooner or later there will be a story of getting a hot shot straight to the forehead.  

This is 2 Lives. From KJZZ Original Productions I’m Laurel Morales. 

JAKE BACON: People ask me how I get to have a fox running around my living room and baby skunks follow me around the house it’s just be available. Most things in life you get to do if you just said yes…

Jake says ‘yes’ at least a couple times a week. It started with a red tailed hawk five years ago. Now every time I check Facebook he’s posted a new bird or mammal. Here’s Jake capturing an injured raccoon from someone’s roof with a giant net.

VIDEO: So we’re going to try to get it down. Get it some medical help see what we can do for it. Oh you’re missing an eye too.. Oh look at that. Hi, buddy! Easy Peasy. Thank you so very much.

Here’s a bowl full -- I’m talking a mixing bowl full -- of baby skunks waiting to be fed.

VIDEO: I missed lunchtime by an hour and someone is a little agitated by the delay.(squeaking FADE DOWN) 

MORALES: Don’t you get attached?

BACON:The last skunk we have definitely imprinted on myself and my daughter. Yeah, the thought of having it deskunked having it be a house pet that thought comes back a lot but it’s completely irresponsible and not fair to that skunk. And there will be endless numbers of skunks.

I interview Jake in his front yard, which explains some of the background noise. 

BACON: My friends call it the Sanford & Sons junkyard.

Jake has permission to transport federally protected animals to a wildlife rehabilitation center in Phoenix. And local authorities often count on him to deal with animal calls when they’re too busy.

BACON: And they’re understanding that I’m not going to become Flagstaff’s answer to Tiger King and I’m not going to horde animals.

His obsession with animals started when he was a kid. His parents were officers in the Royal Air Force so Jake was born in southeast Asia but grew up in Australia and England. 

MORALES: On my parents farm in the southwestern England we had fields that we raised cattle and sheep in and then we had a really magical strip of woodland and we’d watch the badgers come out.

At one point they lived next to Hyde Park in Central London. As a six year old boy he would walk alone across the park and into the Natural History Museum pass the giant dinosaur skeleton and up the stairs.

JAKE BACON: There is a Victorian case at the top of the stairs in the with 500 taxidermied humming birds. I remember the first time I saw them when I was six years old I walked around the corner and it looked like jewels, rubies and diamonds, and sapphires and emeralds.

His love for animals got him in a bit of a jam last year when he was coming home from Sedona and saw a baby elk that had been hit by a car.

JAKE BACON: The baby elk was still alive. The mother elk was standing 10 feet away watching and distressed. The car that hit the elk was being driven by two Navajo ladies who were super upset… 

The elk was so badly injured — it appeared to have a broken back — He thought the most humane thing to do was to put the animal out of its misery. He had a knife but didn’t want to make a big mess.

JAKE BACON: There’s a comical way that things tend to happen for me that if I cut this elks jugular with my knife it’s going to look like a theater production of Carrie and I’m going to get back into someone else’s car dripping with blood.

But he felt he had to do something.

JAKE BACON: I paid far too much attention to the distress of all the people I was with.

The thing is Jake is usually trying to help save wildlife…

JAKE BACON: And so being put in the situation where I’m choking this baby elk while the two Navajo ladies keep asking me if its going to be ok while my two friends keep asking me if its going to be ok and through gritted teeth I’m keep telling them, ‘I’m pretty sure it’s not going to be ok!’ I’ve watched enough TV. It takes a minute. It doesn’t take a minute to strangle an elk. After 15 minutes I let go because it’s still. I’m just about to get off of it and all of a sudden it takes a huge rasping breath everybody explodes, ‘it’s going to be alright!’ 

Jake finished the job. The elk finally died. A few days went by…

JAKE BACON: It’s three days later when I got out of the shower there was a huge bite the size of a grapefruit on my left butt cheek … My fear was I had photographed a gentleman in town who’d been bitten on the head by a brown recluse. It caused all kinds of hideous health issues for him.

Over the following weeks the mark grew to cover Jake’s entire back.

JAKE BACON:  All of a sudden I started getting this crushing fatigue … then it was cardiac issues then finally I had brain issues where there was a constant foggyness constant fizzing.

Jake did what most of us do when we’re uncertain about our symptoms he googled them. And he was convinced he had lyme disease. So he went to a doctor and told him so. The doctor said, ‘no way, there’s no lyme disease in Arizona.’

JAKE BACON: I was convinced I was dying. I would catch myself not breathing. My breath was really shallow. It’s a bacterial infection that gets systemic and just wrecks everything. So it gets in your joints. It gets in your brain. It gets in your heart, your lungs. If people go a couple of years undiagnosed, it becomes a chronic lifetime illness.

It took Jake 6 months to figure out that he did indeed have lyme disease. He caught it from a tick on the back of that elk. And he could’ve died if he hadn’t insisted on being treated for a disease that rarely shows up in Arizona.

So he went on Facebook with a jar full of limes L-I-M-E-S to tell friends.

FB VIDEO: …I’ve been telling people one at a time but I thought it was time to tell everyone… if you find me to be spacier than usual…I drove to the petrol station and couldn’t figure out why I was there even though I was in a car with no gas in it. But I’m a little spacey because I’m full of limes.

Joking aside Jake was worried about leaving his kids without a father. His own dad died when he was only 2 months old. He flew a plane into the side of a mountain during a storm. Jake knew what it was like to grow up without a father and did not want that for his kids.

JAKE BACON:  It was like I’m dying I have three daughters and a grandson dying is not an option. I’m the person who cares for others.

Jake is part of a small group of people in Flagstaff who have to deal with death — both as the animal rescue guy and as the newspaper’s chief photographer.

JAKE BACON: They come to the murder scene. They come to the person whose been run over by the train and they pay an incredible price.

MORALES: What price do you pay? JAKE BACON: I’m 53 years old. I’m single. I have watched my father be buried. I’ve watched my brother be buried. I’ve watched my best friend in high school be buried. It’s unimaginable.

So six years ago when an investigator and two social workers came to his door one morning, he knew it was bad news.

JAKE BACON: My first concern was worrying about my friend Ryan how much that must suck for him.

Ryan told Jake that his 19-year-old son Sam was dead. He died of a drug overdose — cocaine and methadone.

Jake’s youngest Charlie was only five.

JAKE BACON: And I had to sit her down in a swing in the back garden and say something terrible happened while you left and her first response was, ‘one of my chickens died.’ I’m sitting there as a father with the intention of destroying the heart of this pure innocent child and there’s humor. What’s the biggest thing that could happen in her world? One of her damn chickens is dead.

Jake says grief sneaks up on you at the most random moments.

JAKE BACON: I was cooking a couple months ago in the kitchen thinking about a list of things that I needed to get done and all of a sudden Sam was in the living room laughing. And I burst into tears I and Charlie was sitting on the couch watching funny vines on TV. And her brother’s laugh was coming out of her mouth. She’s like, ‘what’s wrong?’ And I said, ‘I heard your brother.’

Jake blames Sam’s addiction on witnessing a brutal divorce between Jake and Sam’s mom.

JAKE BACON: And I truly believed that I was fighting a good fight and I was fighting for him. And I was completely blind to the price that he was paying. He internalized that. And I truly believe that led to self medication that led to substance abuse I had sent him to rehab twice.

Sam’s death had a powerful impact on Jake. He taught his dad an unforgettable lesson. 

JAKE BACON: That even when I thought that I was justified and in the right you can be in the right and you can still do unspeakable harm. And so I made the decision the day that he died that I would stand for his mom the way he would if he were there as a way to honor him. And I can be kind and I can look at responses to things and be like ‘are you doing this out of love or are you doing this out of anger?’ Thats a heavy burden. No, it’s not. It’s a really light burden. I have a chance to do better. It sounds really heavy but its an absolute gift. The day my friend Ryan stepped down the steps to that house the course of my life irrevocably changed I am a different human being the experiences I have all are changed.

MORALES: I can’t help but think five years ago was when you rescued the hawk and six years ago was when Sam died that the two aren’t connected in some way?

JAKE BACON: Clearly there were holes in my life where I felt if I rescued other people my wholeness was determined by rescuing others which is not a good way to live your life and speaks more about what’s wrong with you than about what’s wrong with others. 

And Jake says rescuing animals on top of his full time photography work has kept him too busy to think about all the people he’s lost.

JAKE BACON: At the end of the day the house was quiet, that's when the ghosts would come. That’s when I would think about what bus full of nuns did I burn in a former life that this loss keeps coming?

Jake's 13 year old daughter Charlie comes out of the house with one of their latest foster animals, a baby squirrel so small it can fit in one hand. It crawls up her arm and onto her shoulder. She remains completely unfazed.

JAKE BACON: So Charlie, this is Laurel. MORALES: Hi. Nice to meet you. CHARLIE BACON: Nice to meet you too.

Charlie, who has her dad’s blue eyes, is a more than willing animal caregiver getting up at all hours to help with feedings. But Jake can’t get her to do the dishes.

JAKE BACON: So you’ll only help me with the animals. 

CHARLIE BACON: Yes, the animals are more important.

JAKE BACON: So you’ll get up in the middle of the night to help with animals but you won’t do chores.

CHARLIE BACON: Yes…

Here’s a video of Jake and Charlie releasing the now grown skunks into the wild.

VIDEO: (Releasing skunks into the wild) CHARLIE: Come here.

JAKE: They came to us in a bucket tiny little skunks with their eyes closed completely helpless and now they’re grown up…

MORALES: What was that like? CHARLIE BACON: It was sad because I was going to miss them but also stressful because I saw a hawk flying around earlier. I was scared the hawk was going to eat em. MORALES: And what about when they die because you get a lot of animals that are hurt? CHARLIE: I mean if we know it has a bigger chance of dying it’s not as hard to deal with like the smaller squirrel that died this morning. It wasn’t too difficult. We knew it was going to happen.

JAKE BACON:  A lot of what my daughter and I do is take stress away from other people…Seeing things die that shouldn’t die is challenging. I adopt a Winston Churchill quote of “never ever ever ever give up.” PAUSE When I have something that’s dying it’s not fair. Life is fundamentally not based on fairness. It’s another of those soft skills that I hope my children learn because joy and sadness are equally vital and important parts of life.

…And as Khalil Gibran says, “the deeper the sorrow carves into your being, the more joy you can contain."

This is 2 Lives. I’m Laurel Morales.