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Comment by Simucal | Hacker News Reader

Is it standard operating procedure for SWAT teams to always kill the dogs of the homes they enter? It seems like every story I read about a police raid usually ends with the household dogs getting killed. That is the most enraging part of this story. My dog is like family to me and if someone killed him I would be absolutely devastated.

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Cops are cowards and are terrified of dogs, especially in high stress environments. Sometimes they kill them just to remove the possibility of a threat from them. As many people consider their pets part of their family (myself included), I'm surprise there haven't been any revenge killings of the cops involved yet. I suspect it's only a matter of time before they do it to the wrong person.

Edit: Cops kill dogs so often there's a website that tracks (some) of the stories. http://dogmurders.wordpress.com/

Wow, this site clearly shows they are not killing pitbulls or stuff like that. Labradors. The nicest dogs ever. This is disgusting.

It does seem to be SOP and not just in SWAT raids, and answering codyb this has to my knowledge held true for years, Balko doesn't have to do much cherry picking to cite a lot of puppycide incidents. Hmmm, they might be particularly prominent because they're tangible unlike "police terrified my family and me" but didn't kill or seriously injure humans.

I have seen our local police spray mace/pepper spray on dogs, but have not heard of any dogs being shot here unless the police were actually being attacked.

I too am a dog aficionado, and I can't imagine the feeling of having my best friends shot simply because of an error.

That said, some dogs are naturally protective of their family members, and it is the responsibility of dog owners to train their dogs sufficiently to be able to maintain control of their dogs, even while being restrained by authorities.

This is where Schutzhund training comes into play. My dogs respond to both voice commands as well as hand signals. When I say "Pfui! Ablegen!" my dogs immediately lie down and are still. The same with "Platz."

I have trained my dogs to work well in varying situations, including violent confrontations, with/without firearms, attackers with bats, etc, and it takes a level of commitment that the casual dog owner lacks.

I was urged into Schutzhund training by a neighbor who raises beautiful Rottweilers and he didn't want to see any uncontrolled bull-dogs in this neighborhood. (rural agriculture, and my dogs run loose on my un-fenced property) It was the best thing to ever happen for my dogs and I.

I suspect that if you started yelling in a foreign language while one of these teams was trying to secure your house, you'd end up just as dead as your dog.

Who said anything about yelling?

There's a difference between a stern command, and crazed yelling.

I keep forgetting that not everyone has combat experience and the ability to remain calm in tense situations. Besides, any reasonable person who felt threatened by my dog(s) would see the results of my commands and the situation would thereby pose no threat to the police.

From there I could tell the dogs to play dead and further defuse the situation.

The bottom line is that dog owners need to maintain control of their dogs at all times. There are too many dunderheads out there who think it's cool to have a bad ass dog yet have no idea about how to maintain those dogs in a proper fashion.

Living in the country, as I have for most of my life, we don't see too many of these types of police actions, as being in such a close-knit community, everyone knows what everyone else is up to, so the police in this county rarely, if ever, break down the wrong door. I have a long driveway and can see who is coming up to the house from quite a distance, so I don't see how anyone could storm my house without being seen, and once I've identified the interlopers as police I would make sure to place my dogs in their kennels.

I guess that's why I live where I do. I like it this way.

This is not meant to be a defense of the reprehensible police tactics outlined in the article, but rather an example of one way to deal with one's dog(s) in a responsible manner.

It doesn't matter if the dog is lying still or not. They will just shoot it because they've got combat high. It happens to everyone, even seasoned veterans.

In that case I guess it's time to outfit my home with surveillance cameras and immediate upload to off-site storage.

Some fucker shoots my dog for no reason, I want them to pay.

I think most of what you are saying is at best orthogonal to the article, where the dogs were not in any way 'bad ass dogs not under control' but simply stupid little house dogs that were in some cases actually /running away/ when they were shot, and the people were not getting in trouble for being threatening in any way but for not being fast enough to lie still and silent on the ground. It's obviously unlikely that you will ever be in this situation, but if it did happen I don't believe it would go as smoothly as you seem to think.

I also wondered that and also wonder if perhaps, for the book, raids were cherry picked which contained dog killings.

Despite this, the stories which were picked are absolutely disheartening and frightening.

To some extent, you hear this because Radley Balko is the major voice in America talking about SWAT raids gone wrong, and Balko is a dog-lover who is, like you, outraged by dog-shootings.

It would be a lot harder for Balko to cite so many instances of it happening if there weren't so many instances of it happening.

Totally. I'm not arguing that it doesn't happen, and happen with considerable frequency. I'm saying that when the parent poster suggests that he sees it basically every time, that's because Balko is an incredibly dominant presence in this area of reporting, and he highlights cases that involve dogs being shot.

I don't regard this as a problem, and I think that Balko is invaluable. I do wish that more reporters would take up this issue.

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