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.