When is putting animals in danger okay?

This is in response to Joan Gershman's article, "Stop Hero-Worshiping Police Dogs."

I don't like it either, but I have a bit of a different perspective.

Even with breeding, a dog can wash out. They need to be motivated to do the work. Breeding police dogs involves only breeding dogs that are motivated to do the work, and will do so happily, so this increases the likelihood that their offspring will feel the same way but it doesn't guarantee anything.

I'm in some force free training groups, which is a concept you might be interested in. I'm not a huge fan of police training.

I think police culture encourages violence. They train everyone involved to be ready to shoot. They don't address the root causes and there's not enough focus on de-escalation or building infrastructure that will reduce crime.

Dogs are violent in police work. They're trained to bite.

The focus of police work is to put down and put away anyone not doing what the police want them to do. We make the laws, and sometimes the laws are not fair. (Jim Crow, anyone? This wasn't long ago. This was my grandma's generation. Some of you are her age.) I'm more focused on fair.

Dogs can consent. I ask my dog if I can pick her up, and she either moves toward me or moves away. I ask if she wants me to help her off the couch and she either waits for me to pick her up (almost never 😅) or she jumps off herself. There's also a lot of people filming their dogs using pre-recorded buttons to talk these days--Bunny is one of the most popular ones, and she's been doing it since she was a puppy. You might be surprised at how much context they can convey!

When a working dog is no longer enthusiastic about the work, they retire that dog. It's not in anyone's best interest for the dog to continue working if they don't want to.

It's true that they don't get to choose their career, because it's not easy to explain to a dog what a career is. It's also true that they're bred for this specific purpose, and when you remove them from that purpose they tend to search it out.

(I say "not easy" instead of "impossible" because Bunny can understand that she will get to see a specific friend tomorrow. If that's possible, then it's possible to teach a dog about time, and I don't think we know how far that can go just yet. I don't know if it's possible to teach this before a police dog starts its training, though, since they start pretty young and it takes a lot of time to teach that concept.)

So the dog has to want to do the work, and when they don't want to do it anymore they're allowed to leave.

They ARE shaped by humans, though. They're led into this line of work deliberately. They're specifically put in a position that can harm them, and this is done so that they can harm others. They might not do it every single time--they need a rock solid response to qualify for the work, so their handler won't set them on every person they chase, and they'll stop as soon as they're told--but I don't think it's a good enough reason to justify their use.

The search and rescue dogs and bomb sniffer dogs are helping to find missing loved ones and preserve life, when a better option isn't available their use is merited. It would certainly be better to use a robot to detect mines, but when those aren't available or are less accurate, putting dogs in danger will save more lives than not.

The people who use police dogs don't want to understand this, unfortunately, because they believe their cause merits putting their dogs in harm's way. Social and mental conditioning is very powerful, and very difficult to combat. It takes a long time.

It's a lot easier to prove that bomb sniffers and search and rescue teams save lives than it is to prove that police dogs are necessary. Although drugs might be harmful, they don't pose the same danger a bomb does. DUI's are much different from a drug incarceration, the war on drugs doesn't work (and that's aside from its shady origins), and it's much better to provide addicts with support.

(As I've mentioned multiple times, that's something that law enforcement doesn't offer.)

In the end, I think Joan and I are on the same page--that it's not okay to put a dog in danger for this purpose. In fact, I think we'll both agree that it's not ideal for dogs to be put in danger for any reason, and that as soon as we can figure out an alternate way to save people, we should use it.

In the meantime, please enjoy this story about a bomb-sniffing rat.