United Liberty

Mark your calendars everyone. This is an historic day, if you are familiar with my thoughts on government spending, especially spending involving the police, because today I am proposing that the government spend taxpayer dollars on something that they do not already. I want them to spend time and money to educate police about dog behavior and body language.

This week, a news story about an off-duty police officer in Iowa shooting a Labrador Retriever named Gus with his service weapon prompted me to share my thoughts on proposing spending that I think most Americans can get behind. I want to see police departments, from Mayberry-style towns to major metropolises, spend a very small amount of their budgets to educate officers in a basic understanding dog behavior and canine body language, preventing stories like this, this, and that from affecting another family. I could link to and list stories of innocent family pets gunned down by law enforcement, but this article would get very uninteresting very fast if I did so. In fact, at one point, I considered starting a blog focused on nothing but stories of ill-equipped and inadequately trained police and their assault on our family pets, but I found that I would be unable to maintain my positive outlook and sunny disposition if I immersed myself in stories of that nature.

Training officers how to interpret the actions of members of the family in the nation with the world’s largest pet dog population, where there is approximately one canine for every five citizens seems like a no-brainer. The training can be integrated into academies and workshopped for officers that are already on the job with minimal effect on their schedule. You would think with the large number of K-9 units, that all officers would have training to ensure their safety, along with the public’s, however only the partners of those working dogs have an adequate understanding of canine behavior.

This is not a call to spend billions of man hours or trillions of dollars to fully understand canine behavior. We can accomplish this task with about eight hours of training, focusing on learning about body language, experiencing it in real-life situations, and testing for comprehension. Currently, police departments spend at least $400 and 24 man hours per officer for a six-week language course to make their officers able to communicate with those they serve and protect that do not speak the native language of this nation. Support for language training as I described caught fire in the western half of the country and spread eastward over the last twenty years.

As I noted earlier, there are estimates of over 60,000,000 pet dogs living here in the United States, the most of any nation in the world. As a writer, activist, and Internet addict, I spend a lot of my time scouring news stories looking for notable stories to educate those in my network about what I see as violations of our liberties or to share stories of those “fighting the good and noble fight.” In that research, I estimate that I read, see or hear at least 3 stories a month across the country where a family pet, described as docile and friendly by those that know him or her, is killed or injured by a police officer’s deadly aresenal and lack of training.

Perhaps we could take budget money away from re-purposing military tanks for deployment into civilian policing, paying salaries and legal bills for criminal officers like this, or continuing to pay for the War on Drugs to pay for my proposal, so we can prevent a budget deficit. Why can we not take away a few dollars to keep my daughters safe?