It's time to teach the police
some new tricks.
A. Barton Hinkle |
A police officer chasing a
suspect entered Bianca Alakson's fenced-in backyard the other day. When her
10-month-old Labrador-mix puppy ran toward the Redford Township, Ohio, officer,
he shot the dog twice, killing it. Alakson's boyfriend, Ryan Showalter, ran
outside and demanded to know why. He was arrested for interfering with an
investigation.
"I asked him why,"
Showalter said. "And he said, 'Because he was in our way.' I was breaking
down hysterically in the back seat of the cop car, crying. I didn't know what
to do."
This wasn't long after Cole
Middleton, a resident of Raines County, Texas, called the police to report that
his house had been burgled. When an officer arrived Middleton's dog started
barking. According to news reports, "the deputy claimed the dog was about
to bite him and shot the dog to defend himself. … Middleton says the dog was
shot in the head. He begged the deputy to finish off his cowdog named Candy
since the dog was suffering."
"I was so upset,"
Middleton told KLTV-7 News. "I went over there to her and she was still
alive and I begged and pleaded with him to please shoot her again because I
don't have any firearms. They got stolen. He went and got in his vehicle and
backed out of my driveway.
"And then I had to do the
unthinkable. … I had to kill my dog with my bare hands and put her out of her
suffering, praying for this to be over with," Middleton said.
Those are just two of many
cases in which police officers have killed family pets recently and without any
apparent justification. There have been countless others. Police entered a back
yard in Mobile, Alabama, encountered a dog, and shot it. A Tehachapi,
California, officer saw a dog run toward him while he was performing routine
code enforcement checks. "He just pulled out his gun and boom, boom,
boom," reported a witness. An officer responding to a complaint about a
moving van in the street in Columbus, Ohio, shot a dog nine times after it
growled at him. And in Filer, Idaho, an officer shot a dog whose owner was
throwing his 9-year-old son a birthday party. You can watch the dash-cam video
(warning: strong content and language) by Googling "officer shoots dog at
boy’s birthday party."
In most such cases, what
happens afterward is: nothing. The police department says it will investigate
the shooting, and then the incident disappears into a circular file or a black
hole. Not always: The Texas officer who shot Middleton's dog was fired. But the
police department in Filer decided officer Tarek Hassani was justified in using
deadly force against a family pet.
Fortunately, some police
departments have begun training officers in how to read animal behavior. Most
dogs that feel threatened don't run toward the perceived threat, for
instance—they run away. "An approaching dog is almost always
friendly," according to a Justice Department report, "The Problem of
Dog-Related Incidents and Encounters." Here in Virginia some departments
do a better job than others. But the commonwealth has not passed a law
requiring such training, as Colorado has.
Meanwhile, public pressure to
protect dogs is mounting. Filer residents were so upset by its department's
decision that some launched a recall effort to unseat the mayor and the entire
city council. A Kickstarter campaign has raised more than $45,000 for the
documentary Puppycide.
"When we first learned
about puppycide," the filmmakers write, "we assumed that these must
be cases of police responding to threats on their lives from dogs trained to
attack by criminal owners. That couldn't be further from the truth. We found
scores of videos and news stories about dogs who were laying down, tails
wagging, even running away but still shot by officers who used lethal force as
their first and only response."
Nobody wants to see police
officers—already underpaid and underappreciated—get hurt in the line of duty.
What people object to is the gratuitous slaughter of pets that pose no threat.
Officers couldn't shoot children with such impunity, and many pet owners love
their animals almost as much as their kids.
That shouldn't be surprising. A
special bond between people and dogs has developed over thousands of years of
domestication.
Recent work by Hungarian
researchers has shown that dogs can read emotion in human voices and, as The
Washington Post reported the other day, "other studies have revealed that
dogs yawn when they see humans yawning and that they nuzzle and lick people who
are crying; scientists consider both behaviors displays of empathy, a rarely
documented trait in the animal kingdom."
If dogs can read other species'
behavior signals and show empathy toward them, then surely police officers
should be able to as well.
