Police Need Animal Encounter Training

January 1, 1970

Sturgeon, MO, is a town of 900 (give or take) that touts family values, peaceful Amish neighbors, and an abundance of small farms. But that pastoral picture evaporated on May 19, after police officers responded to a call about a loose dog who looked lost. Upon locating the pup, Teddy — a 13-pound, 5-year-old Shih Tzu who was blind and deaf — an officer shot them to death, claiming the dog seemed rabid. (You can view that very disturbing bodycam footage here.) Residents were so apoplectic over this act of violence, the mayor resigned. Meanwhile, Teddy’s owner has filed a $1 million suit against the city.

Last year, roughly 300 miles south, in Dexter, MO, a nine-year-old Black Lab mix named Parker ran away during a thunderstorm. A Good Samaritan called the police for help in finding Parker’s family. An officer arrived, took the dog, drove them to another location, shot them, and then threw the lifeless body into a ditch. Parker’s owners are suing the sheriff’s office for $5 million. A couple hours away in St. Louis, MO, a woman received a $750,000 settlement after a SWAT team raided her home in 2019 citing a gas-line complaint, and fired three fatal shots into Kiya, her four-year-old Pit Bull.

“Literally, the number one reason a police officer fires their weapon is to shoot at a dog,” says Chris Green, Executive Director of the Animal Legal Defense Fund (ALDF). “As with other types of police misconduct, this issue is higher in black, brown, and lower-income communities. But it truly could happen to anybody.”

Sadly, this list goes on and on and on, and is by no means specific to the state of Missouri. In fact, according to the Department of Justice, roughly 10,000 dogs are killed each year by police. Because the statistics are not officially reported, it’s prudent to assume that the number is much higher. Still, activists are wondering if the widespread outrage around Teddy’s death could finally bring awareness to the desperate need for animal-encounter training among police officers.

The main problem is that police violence against pets has long been considered a norm, and undoing it requires perseverance. “I started in law enforcement in 1972. And you have to understand…that used to be the way we did things: If you ran into a dog that was, you know, stray or not doing good, you just shot them and called Animal Control,” says John Thompson, a former Deputy Executive Director and Chief Operating Officer for the National Sherriff’s Association (NSA). He became a dog lover after his daughter, an attorney, wrote an article on how serial killers abuse animals. “A lot of [officers], especially in the middle country, have been raised with cockfighting and dogfighting. In their communities, that’s acceptable. But the times are changing.”

The ALDF helped pass a Texas law in 2015 requiring animal-encounter training for cops, which was inspired by a similar law passed in Colorado. “Within just a couple years, the police shooting dogs dropped by over 90 percent,” says Green, who also executive-produced the 2016 documentary, Of Dogs and Men, about police violence against pets. “If you haven’t been trained, you may react the only way you know how to — or you think that’s going to be quickest and most expedient [solution]. Most cops, don’t want to shoot dogs. They just haven’t been trained in any other way to protect themselves.“ Today, many officers, especially in major cities, have gotten animal-encounter training — but overall, a woeful number of cops have not.

Many nonprofits, such as the Humane Society offer this type of training for free. Meanwhile, Dr. James Crosby, the leading canine aggression and forensics expert, penned the “ Law Enforcement Dog Encounters Training ” guide for the U.S. Department of Justice. The manual covers everything from legislation and policies to decoding and properly reacting to canine behavior. (Crosby frequently testifies as an expert in civilian lawsuits against police departments, including the aforementioned St. Louis case.) The Of Dogs and Men site also provides suggestions on screening its film for police forces.

But the now-retired Thompson says that isn’t enough: To make real change, you simply need officers on the inside to compel law enforcement to understand the importance of animal-encounter training. “Animal advocates try to go in, and most of [the officers] don’t want to hear it. It’s just a culture, and you’re really trying to change that culture. There’s going to be a wall up against you,” says Thompson, who also created the National Law Enforcement Center on Animal Abuse and persuaded the FBI to include animal cruelty crimes in its national crime report. “But for me to go in and do it, it’s easy because I’m a retired police chief with 30 years in law enforcement. They’re going to listen to me.”

“You got to get the sheriff or the police chief to put a policy in effect and say, ‘This is important. We don’t want to shoot dogs,’” he continues. “I show them that a police chief got fired because this happened, and a sheriff got [slapped with] a multi-million dollar lawsuit. Then I tell them about the Hells Angels. That opens their eyes.”

The Hells Angels case is a fairly infamous one, in which the motorcycle club that’s often the target of police and even FBI investigations, won $990,000 from Santa Clara County in California, in addition to more than $1 million in claims. They, like many victims, cited the Fourth Amendment to argue, the American Bar Association (ABA) explains, “that killing a dog is an unlawful seizure” — after officers shot a Rottweiler and two Bullmastiffs while raiding their clubhouse and homes. “When the officer was being deposed,” Green adds, “he was asked, ‘What was your plan to do with dogs? You knew they were there.’ And he said, ‘Well, I was going to show them the shotgun and thought that might scare them away’ — expecting a dog to understand what a shotgun is.”

To that end, Thompson’s approach to police training is decidedly more assertive than Crosby’s method. “The first thing I do is have [the officers] understand how important animals are to people, that they’re basically family,” he says. “A lot of them get it if they have an animal, but if they don’t…I show a lot of videos of people dying to save their animals. Like, I show this little girl who ran out of street and got killed trying to save her dog.”

Humanity aside, there’s another significant reason why preventing canine fatalities may be gaining momentum: Lawsuits cost a lot of money. Green points to a $262,500 settlement stemming from a Commerce City, Colorado, incident in which a cop was filmed shooting a three-year-old, mixed-breed therapy dog named Chloe. “It was such an egregious shooting,” says Green, who four years ago authored an ABA resolution on this topic. “And the city representative said, ‘No big deal, because, you know, our deductible was only like $50,000 and our insurer just picked up the rest.’ If you’re an insurance company, that’s a no-no.”

Despite the sprawling nature of this problem, Green does believe the tide is slowly shifting and that body cams are a big reason why. And there is reason for hope, thanks to the continual evidence reminding us that training actually works. He cites an incident in Arlington, Texas, that went viral after police responded to calls about an aggressive Pit Bull named Jeffrey, “with one caller pleading, ‘This dog is so vicious, please get him,’ the ABA writes in its resolution. Officers, fresh off animal-encounter training, arrived and observed the dog for a moment. They determined this pup was simply lost and scared, so they lured him into the backseat of their police car with a protein bar. When the dog cut loose again a few weeks later, one of the officers ended up adopting Jeffrey rather than sending then to a shelter. Soon after, the policeman changed his new dog’s name to Chance. “Everybody wins,” Green says, “when you prevent these bad situations from happening in the first place.”

Nisha Gopalan

Nisha Gopalan has been a writer/editor for The New York Times, New York magazine, Entertainment Weekly, Variety, The Hollywood Reporter, and NYLON magazines. She currently resides in Los Angeles.