09:46 – The morning paper says the Winston-Salem cops shot another dog. Apparently, the cops responded to a home alarm and three dogs came rushing out of the garage. The cops say at least two of the dogs bit one of the cops. The dogs then ran around the house and disappeared. One dog apparently returned and approached the cops to within 15 feet (~ 5 meters) while growling. The cops shot it.
As Barbara said, the cops have a right to protect themselves from being bitten, even though the dogs were just doing their jobs, protecting against intruders. But I have to wonder if our cops haven’t gotten trigger-happy. Presumably they carry pepper spray, which would be at least as effective as small arms fire against an aggressive dog. Cops are notoriously rotten shots, and discharging their pistols in a residential neighborhood presents very real dangers to innocent civilians. To drive that point home, a month or so ago the newly-appointed Chief of Police of Winston-Salem shot a dog. He grazed the dog and wounded a woman who was in his line of fire.
I didn’t witness either incident, but my impression based on the news reports and police statements is that in both cases the cops acted irresponsibly. Their firearms should be their last choice against aggressive dogs, not their first. In the first incident, the woman suffered only minor wounds from spattering bullet fragments, and apparently no person was injured by police bullets in the recent incident. But that’s just luck. In either incident the results might instead have been tragic.
Do dogs in such situations respond favorably to treats? I’ve been barked at a number of times by dogs I don’t know, and often just acting unafraid will relax the dog – it starts wagging its tail and comes over for a pat.
All Hail Bruce Lee!
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2013-07-20/exhibition-marks-40th-anniversary-of-bruce-lee-death/4832970
Depends on the dog’s basic nature and how it’s been trained.
In a former incarnation, I worked with dogs with various levels of training. The cheapest were the guard dogs (think junkyard dog). These dogs were intentionally abused from the time they were puppies. They were taught to hate all humans. They would attack any human given the chance, including their own handlers. The next level up were the personal-protection dogs. They would protect their handlers, who kept them as pets at home when they were off-duty. Off-duty, they just acted like regular dogs, playing with the kids and so on. The highest level and most expensive were the attack-on-command dogs. Only a tiny percentage of dogs could be trained to this level. An attack-on-command dog will do just that. The handler says “get him” and the dog attacks viciously until called off. That dog will attack anything on command including a small child. Not one out of thousand dogs can be trained that way. We paid something like $30,000 each for these dogs, and that was in 1979.
But every one of those classes of dogs were trained not to accept food from strangers. The trainers would have someone strange to the dog offer it a piece of meat that was coated with cayenne pepper or something. The dogs soon learned that it wasn’t safe to accept food from anyone other than their handlers.
Many cops seem to be trigger-happy these days and discharging their firearms often seems to be the first resort, not the last. From what I can see, this is a result of a lower caliber of person selected for these jobs and very inferior training. The attitude seems to be that if an officer or officers feel, or claim to feel, the slightest bit threatened in any way by another human being or an animal, they should immediately respond with lethal force until the threat is dead. Couple this, as Bob says, with the fact that their firearms training sucks and they’re mostly lousy shots, and their sidearms are 9mm and .40 crunchentickers with 14-16-round magazines and you have A Recipe for Disaster in the form of accidental discharges and collateral casualties.
The other phenomenon that seems to be taking place is that they’re targeting more victimless crimes and more alleged violations of this or that specious Nanny-State law or regulation, like sending in SWAT to bust up poker games and the like. Or they stop a car with two women in it, find a roach on the seat, and perform a full body-cavity search on the side of the public road. Arrest and strip-search at the station for an overdue library book. Up here the state police will spare no effort in busting pot growers and smokers, while cruising up and down the interstate and state highways cracking down on people with expired inspection stickers and broken taillights. They occasionally fall into a meth lab bust after some crackhead informer dimes it out. Then, oh Lord, the full media blitz with haz-mat trucks out front, fluorescent green tape all over the street, fire trucks, ambulances, and half a dozen cruisers. Upshot: two or three scruffy trailer trash bozos who can barely tie their shoes; Crime of the Century. And it’s nothing like the mega-lab on “Breaking Bad,” these cretins use the one-pot method to cook their junk, still the fumes are very dangerous.
Temps up here dropped considerably overnight and are now bearable, with a nice breeze off the lake and overcast.
And OFD now has six decades on the planet; sixty years ago the North Korean Reds signed the “armistice;” Koba the Dread died and went straight to Hell; and there were record high temps in NYC and Megalopolis, reaching 100 and up, like this past week.
Mrs. OFD back from Marion, Indiana today and off to Philadelphia tomorrow.
Happy birthday old fella… 🙂
I’m freezing my butt off down here. Got a couple of heaters going 24×7, not making much impression. Been raining every day for a week, we had bright sunshine for about 30 minutes, then the rain returned. I really need it to dry out and warm up so I can dry some washing and do some yard work.
There have been a number of articles recently about cops shooting dogs – usually as a first resort. There are training courses available from a number of non-profits on how to recognize a hostile dog (vs. a friendly one running towards the cop to be petted). Most police departments don’t bother to train their cops on it. In addition, the Postal Service has a training program that has drastically reduced the number of letter carriers bitten by dogs.
One of the writers at Reason has a book out on the militarization of the police. Here’s an essay by him on the topic: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323848804578608040780519904.html?mod=wsj_share_tweet
It’s gotten so bad that a family in Nevada has filed a civil rights lawsuit based on the Third Amendment (no quartering of troops in peacetime). http://news.investors.com/ibd-editorials/071513-663810-henderson-nevada-family-third-amendment-rights-violated.htm?ven=rss&utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=twitter
I’m thinking the thing to do is to lay recording equipment around your house: video covering all directions and an audio pickup by the front door. Go ahead and put up a sign warning that visitors are being recorded if necessary for legal compliance. If the stupid pigs bash your door in without adequate announcement, you’ll have evidence. If the recording equipment is somehow damaged just before the door was bashed in, that’s evidence of another sort. I doubt it’s anywhere near universally applied, but I have heard of a number of cases where the stupid pigs confiscated, and then lost or destroyed, electronics which were recording vehicle stops and the judge took the ordinary person’s word for the way the interaction went; the reasoning was that if the recording showed that the stupid pig’s story was supported by the recording then the recording wouldn’t have been damaged.
I also support requiring all stupid pigs to wear audiovisual recording equipment and GPS trackers, all of which must remain on during their entire shift. Electronics now are reliable enough and can be rugged enough that “my camera just stopped working for some reason” will be no excuse. OFD, as a one-time (hopefully not stupid) pig may have some reason this is not practicable, but I can’t see any. If the stupid pigs have nothing to hide, then there’s no reason for them not to be recorded while on duty.