SHD
I agree with Latrans.
My dogs are very large and they are protective of myself, my husband and my family. I would be horrified if anything happened to my dogs. If something like that happened, I would be going to jail for attempted murder or just plain murder. My dogs are my life and they are my babies. I protect them the best way I can by keeping them on my property and on leashes and in fenced yards. But now a days, it seems cops are allowed to come onto a person's property all willy-nilly, without a warrant or anything like that.
It's sicking to watch/read any/all of those video's and even worse to try to imagine how it would be if it were your shoes. It needs to stop. Officer's need to be taught to look for the correct signs of aggression and learn that the firearm on their hip is the LAST form of protection, not the first. Pepper spray, the baton stick or even good ol' fashion getting back into your damn car and letting the person control the dog or calling animal control in the first place are the first steps to dealing with a situation of that sorts.
I agree as well that dogs should be considered member's of the person's family. Not property like a car. They are living and breathing creatures and they do not know what a gun is. They have NO idea what threat that little black piece of metal is when it's pointed at them. It does nothing. Period. To a dog's mind when a gun is pointed at them. Officer's need to understand that when they go into a situation, you can not go into an area containing a dog or even possibly containing a dog like a bat out of hell. It needs to be thought out, planned and executed with brains and common sense.
One of my friend's is a police officer and I like him. He own's two dogs and he loves dogs. Thankfully, he's smart enough to never have put himself into a situation like the one's in OP's post, but, I think I may speak to him about setting up a training course in which officer's understand what they can do to protect themselves against dogs without using lethal force.
They need to pick the non lethal measures before killing the dog. Reading further into Geist's story, the officer was completely in the wrong. First off before going and searching the entire neighborhood, the officer should have made a search on the entire house. ((If you didn't read it, a three year old boy went missing. He was found asleep in his basement.)) Second when the officer knocked on the door, and nobody was home, he should have then called the owner, or in some way found a way to contact the owner, not just let himself into the backyard to search for the kid.
And what pissed me off the most about this is after he shot and killed the dog he just left. No note, no call. He just left the body there for the owner to find. It's horrifying.
Every day I watch cops abusing their power more and more, and it is disgusting. Last night my boyfriend and I got pulled over because we were 'swerving all over the road' which was bull. It was windy, and our truck was being slightly pushed off kilter by the wind. What the officer saw was him re-correcting our vehicles path. But the officer turned without a blinker and blew through a stop sign, while speeding in a neighborhood area, just to pull us over. And guess what boyfriend hates cops so much (we have some really nasty, a*****e cops over here.) that he keeps a camera on his dash every time he gets in the car, recording the entire time we drive? And we got what he did, and how he treated us on film. I was accused of being a prostitute for wearing a short skirt, and the cop wanted to search the car without a warrant for drugs and or weapons. What ******** right do you have?
He didn't ticket us, but take a guess on who is getting his name and badge number reported, with that nice video? I think in an hour or so I'll be heading down to the police station to speak with the chief because I am pissed.
There was another officer who shot a dog right down the street from us, because when he knocked on the door the lab wriggled out of the front door and jumped on the cop to say hi. Guess who got off easy?
Cops need special training when it comes to animals, and to be forced to wear a GoPro camera running on their shoulders at ALL times. And they need to stop abusing their power.
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