Let’s hope that Dogs in Ireland never face this…

Joe | blog | August 26, 2010

On Monday, August 2, an off-duty police officer pulled a 9mm weapon loaded with deadly hollow point bullets and gunned down a dog in a suburban off-leash dog park because he was playing too roughly with the officer’s dog.  Keith Elgin Shepherd of Severrn, MD, claimed that he and his dog were being attacked.  Shepherd sustained no injuries, and according to Animal Control, not “a scratch” was found on his dog after the incident.  Not only was the dog shot needlessly, but when the owner tried to get to his mortally wounded pet Shepherd threatened him back with a taser.

(Correction:  An officer who responded to the call is the one who threatened the owner with a taser, not Shepherd.  However, this still illustrates the point of this article that in the eyes of law enforcement officials, the needless shooting of a dog is acceptable.)

CBC in British Columbia reported a case of a 6 year old pit bull with no history of aggression being shot and killed on her owner’s private property by officers conducting an unannounced training exercise.

In Eastern Tennessee an innocent man, his wife, and 17 year old son were pulled out of their car on the highway, forced to kneel, and were handcuffed in a case of mistaken identity.  They begged the officer to close the car door so that their dog wouldn’t jump out.  The officer refused.  The dog did jump out of the car, and a video of the incident showed the medium-sized brown dog wagging his tail in a playful manner.  The officer shot the dog dead.

In a Cleveland suburb, an officer chased a child who was throwing water balloons at cars through a yard.  A dog who was on a chain lunged at him and he fired at and shot the dog.  This bears repeating… a dog who was ON A CHAIN, not loose, lunged at him.  The shooting was ruled as justified.

In Westlake, OH, an officer responded to a home burglar alarm that was set off when the owner’s dogs managed to get through a door and into their yard.  While on the owner’s property, the officer shot and killed the labrador retriever, claiming that the dog charged him.  Not only did he also carry mace, a taser, and a nightstick, but he and other Westlake officers had previously responded to the same alarm set off by the owner’s dogs four previous times.  The offending officer claimed to have forgotten that there were dogs at the house.

A lab mix in Milwaukee who romped with neighborhood children and visited a nursing home was shot in the legs when he jumped a fence and ran towards an officer.  The injured dog hid under some bushes, and the owner begged the cop to allow her to help the dog.  She was refused, and then the prone dog was shot twice more and killed.

There are pages and pages of these incidents that come up in an online search.  It seems that in our present society it’s perfectly acceptable for an officer of the law to pull a gun and kill a dog.  In some of these cases perhaps the dogs were charging the officers, and the use of mace or a taser to stop the attack may have been warranted.  In other cases the dogs were showing no signs of aggression whatsoever.  If a cop claims that he felt threatened, that is apparently all that is required to justify the killing of a beloved family pet in the eyes of the law.

Dog lovers everywhere have had enough of this brutal and unnecessary violence.  And the buck stops with this recent incident concerning Bear-Bear, the playful husky murdered in cold blood by Keith Shepherd.  Initially the Anne Arundel officers who were called onto the scene ruled it a justified shooting and the case was closed.  But public outrage was so strong following the incident that the case was again reopened and an investigation is currently underway.

It is very important that a precedent be set here, an example made of this trigger-happy cop, to show armed officers everywhere that they WILL be held accountable for every death and injury of a pet caused by firing their weapons when less deadly force could have been used.  If you would like to get involved, you can join a Facebook page, currently with almost 6000 members, called Justice for Bear-Bear.  There is information at this site with contact information where you can lodge complaints against this officer.   There are also two petitions to ensure that there is a thorough investigation and that Keith Shepherd is prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law:  Justice for Bear-Bear and Death of Bear-Bear.

For the love of dogs, let’s band together to ensure that cops learn that they will be expected to use the same caution in pulling the trigger on our furry family members as they must for other humans.