Last August, New York police responded to an emergency phone call regarding a man who had a seizure and whose dog was making it difficult for people to help. When police arrived, in lieu of assessing the situation and of trying to render assistance to the medical emergency, they ended up shooting the dog in the head. I wrote
about it last year (the post does include the video, which is very graphic).
This is why I think all police encounters should be video recorded. Most will be mundane, but too many police-human and police-nonhuman encounters are not. And when we are giving this much power to a small group of people, it's easy for that imbalance to result in This video is so important because it highlights some very real problems with the way these officers dealt with agitated animals, agitated humans, and injured humans.
Luckily for the dog in the New York shooting, she (Starr, now Shiloh) survived. Her left eye had to be removed, and she has very little hearing abilities. Because of her lack of hearing and vision (or perhaps b/c she just doesn't like dogs!), Shiloh is wary of and sometimes reactive towards other dogs, so she should be an only pup in a dog-savvy home.
Shiloh is available for adoption through, of all rescues, the
National Greyhound Adoption Program.
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