Dayton Police Officer Hits K9
A K9 police officer with his dog.
Background
A couple of day’s ago, PETA issued a statement condemning the treatment of a police K9 who was hit by his human handler. The clip, which you can view for yourself here, has gone viral on social media. The context for this clip is that officers were conducting a joint operation to combat auto theft. The dog, which appears to be a german shepherd, was deployed to capture a suspect but instead bit the handler 3 times. Now there’s a lot to break down in this clip so I’ll just bullet point my observations:
Observations
- From looking at the clip, this was an odd time to deploy a police K9. The suspect was not fleeing, had his hands behind his back, and was literally saying you don’t need to release the dog.
- PETA referred to the animal as in fear and cowering down – not so. This dog looked like it was in the park playing and this was all a game.
- The “hit” that is so viral is a slap on the head and the dog did not care.
Analysis
The dog in question is not well trained. It was not responding to commands and it looked thrilled to see the criminal it was supposed to attack but not interested in biting him. The officer probably needs a refresher course and more K9 handler training. GSD are relatively user friendly compared to Malinois or other dogs used by the police so there’s not really an excuse here especially if the dog is well bred and passed all relevant screening and training. Was this dog abuse? Heck no. If you’ve watched bite training, it is way more intense than anything in this clip and involves actually hitting the dog with a soft stick albeit bit still hitting and yelling and screaming. None that phased the dog at all. PETA is just extremely militant about things like this. They should focus on people eating dogs in China, not a badly handled police K9 situation.
Check out our coverage of a recent fatal dog attack and what you can do to protect yourself here.
