Sober Thal said:
This is what happens when you abandon animals... police are called, and if the animal is violent, it gets put down.
If you don't think that animal was a threat, I don't think you know much about dogs. Watch the video again, after he gets the collar stick on him. That is a violent animal that posed a threat.
Lets see how you respond if someone put a noose around your neck on the end of a pole. This reaction is natural for any animal that has to be secured in such a way, it is a painful thing to the dog and they are scared and will often growl and start trying to escape the pole. After a few minutes of not being strangled the fear begins to subside and the animal becomes controllable.
Even in this video you can see that happening, before the cop pulled out a gun the dog was just standing there, starting to calm down and enter the stage where you could herd it with ease. All they needed to do was wait, get it into the back of the truck and take it to the pound. If it was considered dangerous still at that point, well pounds are good at executing animals away from cameras in ways that don't piss people off...
Notice I used the word secured: This dog was secured. Not only was it leashed to begin with, notice it couldn't run away cause it was chained to the back of a car and only after the pole was on did the chain get released. After they got it on the end of the pole they had full control over it, that is what the pole is designed to do. It keeps the animal at one end while you herd it, against it's will, into the back of a car.
This dog was secured then they decided to shoot it! No ifs and buts about it, no making up reasons as to why they might of shot it for things we didn't see prior to the video or trying to excuse their action because the dog acted in the natural way a stray dog acts to being put on the pole.
What we see here is clean cut, they had a dog on the end of a pole, standing there, then casually drew a gun and shot it.
It would be the same as handcuffing a suspect and then putting a bullet into them. Only difference is human life is considered more important to humans. It is standard self-preservation, not going to argue the what life is more important then another, but that is the only reason they got away with shooting a already captured animal was because it wasn't human. If they had done that to a person, secured and then executed them, we would all be screaming murder.
If I had to throw my two cents in, I believe they wanted to kill it from the start... they knew they couldn't hit the damn thing till they had pinned it down and could, literally, put the gun to the back of it's head. Hey, at least we can be thankful for that, they could of easily just emptied their mags into the dog and hit someone standing on the sidelines.
Oh and PS: That video was shot with a cop camera, built into the vehicle. Can't really say the person filming it had alternative motives as it was the cops themselves...
On review:
I've thought about this more, read more into it, and still wonder if I am sane. My reason for being disappointed over this isn't the death of the dog, it was that the police officer in question felt the need to shoot it. I can't really fathom why, with the dog secured, you would really feel threatened. The only thing I can come up with is: Humans have irrational fears for their safety.
It has been a nagging fact of the modern police force that they are becoming more trigger happy in situations they do not need to be. Not just firearms, other devices like tasers and the like are used well out of proportion. I can't help but feel all this comes from the training they are being given in this day and age.
More military training is given priority, turning the police into a paramilitary arm of the government, over civil training with a emphasis that they are there to protect us. Hell, much of the training is being done by ex-military, along the lines of boot camp which was designed to make it easier to pull the trigger. This has led to a whole bunch of cops that feel they are going into a battle field every time they are called out, and that leads to irrational fear that leads to guns being discharged.
In this situation they probably heard the call for a violent dog and went in thinking they would be bitten and mauled. This rested in the foreground of their mind so heavily they really where feeling threatened, even though the dog was leashed to begin with and put on a pole to the end of it. They likely felt they felt they couldn't trust their animal control equipment, so when it responded in a normal way they may have very well been threatened, thinking it was going to slip free.
Till it slips free you shouldn't discharge the gun even if you do draw it. Hey, it isn't that irrational a fear that it might slip free and being prepared for the moment it does. Just damning to let fear drive you to the point you decide to preempt the possibility by discharging your weapon even when you are in full control of the situation. Sadly, humans are not rational creatures and police are human.
Going into a situation thinking your automatically in danger leads to situations where you over-react to anything. We need better training so our police are strong willed and minded, secure in what they are, as this will lead to less firearm discharges all around. Not just for the dogs in the world, they draw and discharge their weapons based on "I was sacred" with people far to often as well.
