Cowards with guns

[Xiahou]

So instead they shoot it like a berzerk grizzly. With a 12-gague pump shotgun. And it doesn't occur to anyone to just call animal control, the people actually trained to handle situations like this?

I hear these work pretty well:


The sensible thing to do would've been to wait for someone to show up with one of those to apprehend the animal. Had the vicious 45lb dog charged the officers, sure, you have to shoot it, but since it was apparently out of mace range, I don't think it was an imminent threat.

Let's go over this again- A neighbor hears a commotion, comes to look and sees the 45lb neighbor's dog barking at officers. She says 'Please don't shoot that dog. He won't hurt you,'... and they shoot the dog. The dog that they claim was out of the range of mace spray. Something doesn't add up here.

If the dog was roaming outside of the owner's yard, then the owner certainly bears some responsibility for what happened- but that fact alone isn't justification for the police to take free reign to do whatever they want.

[RabidGibbon]

The article doesn't make clear if the officer wielding the shotgun was in the car or not when he fired.
This extract seems to imply the officers took part in a kind of drive/stop by shooting

Posted bt First Article

She saw a Mount Olive Police Department cruiser pull up to the house behind hers.

Then she noticed the shotgun in one of the officer's hands, aimed at her neighbor's 45-pound Labrador retriever.

"I said, 'Please don't shoot that dog. He won't hurt you,'" Mrs. Kulers said.

The officer looked at her, then back at the dog.

A shot rang out -- then, another.

Its possible the officer was out of the vehicle at the time - after all its hard to see how he could be threatened by the dog otherwise, but then given the tale of the mayor whose house was stormed by police men who'd decided to dress up like commandos and who then chased down and shot his dogs it seems like perhaps the police guide lines on shooting dogs are a bit too lax?

However to counterbalance this, I was watching one of those fly on the wall documentaries about police men. An officer was being chased by a dog and he was backing off like crazy with his gun pointed at it, and even my liberal anti establishment dog loving soul thought "why doesn't he just shoot it?" but then his policeman buddy zapped it with a taser and it just went "Yiiiiiiiiiiip!" and took off.

So I suspect some cops realise that its free fire zone on dogs, whilst others are calm and considerate on the subject. I'd like to say the answer is better training and selection, but better training and selection is probably the answer to every government recruitment problem.