Puppycide

Radley Balko at Reason Magazine looks at what appears to be a growing trend:

They're cases where the police walked or drove onto private property (usually at the wrong address), were confronted by the dog that lived on that property, interepreted—correctly or not—the dog's barks or gestures to be threatening, then shot the animal. Last August, video surfaced of a case in Oklahoma where an officer pulled into a woman named Tammy Christopher's driveway to ask directions. When Christopher's Wheaton Terrier ran out of the house to great the officer (the dog appears to be bounding in the video)—still on Christopher's property—the officer shoots the dog dead. Christopher released the video to a local news station when the police department wouldn't listen to her complaint.

What's troubling is how often in these stories the police officer's first reaction is to fire his weapon at the animal. I suppose that reaction might be understandable if the dog is, say, a pit bull, given that type of dog's (not entirely deserved) reputation. But black labs? Dalmatians? Springer spaniels? A Jack Russell? Something's clearly amiss when a police officer can stroll onto the private property of someone who's doing nothing illegal, be confronted by a dog who's merely doing what dogs do—defending his territory—shoot the dog dead, and get nothing but full support from his superiors. Moreover, many of these shootings have happened in neighborhoods, inside of homes, and in a few cases, directly in front of children. You'd think there would be some public safety concerns, too.

Police departments should be training officers how to deal with dogs in ways other than filling them full of bullets. Cops should be taught, for example, how to tell a charging dog from a bounding one; an angry dog from a barking but playful one; and that a curious or territorial bark is much less threatening than a snarl. Mailmen, firemen, paramedics, and the rest of us non-badge-wearing citizens manage to visit private homes and deal with the dogs that may reside in them without resorting gunfire. It's odd that not insignificant number of police officers can't.

There are plenty of ways of safely dealing with even a large, aggressive dog that fall far short of shooting it. I don't know what percentage of police departments offer this sort of training, but it seems clear that quite a few of them don't.