Hi, Dr. I’m just interested to know what your opinions are on police k9 units that are trained to be aggressive. I feel like it’s cruel to train an animal to bite hard, especially when it’s very easy for their handlers to misuse that aggression and cause severe bodily harm where it’s unnecessary. Do you think k9 units are okay? Do you think they’re wrong and unnecessary? Are you indifferent?

drferox:

So there’s lots of different issues to talk about here.

I’ve had very little to do with police K9 units in Australia, and those I’ve seen haven’t been all that bad. The dogs are kind of intense and I would not be in any kind of rush to separate them from their handlers at all but I’m not convinced there’s anything extra cruel about them.

They’re not really ‘trained to be aggressive’. They’re trained to perform a specific behavior, on command. That behavior, eg biting, is part of the dog’s natural aggressive repertoire, but the police dog is not necessarily doing it because it’s aggressive by nature, it’s following instructions.

K9 units can certainly do things humans cannot, with senses that exceed our own, especially in the case of sniffer dogs. And honestly, as rough as it is to say, I’d rather a dog get shot than a human. I can’t prioritize an animal life over a human one.

The police dogs here often live with their handlers during and after their jobs, so I don’t think their welfare is particularly compromised, other than injuries they will potentially receive. And that’s a burden probably more on the law breaker than the police dog handler.

But my experience with police dogs in Australia is not universal, especially on an international scene.

I’ve spoken to someone who used to work with police dogs in another country, obscuring details for privacy, and he was admittedly terrified of these dogs. You could see his body language change when he spoke about them, and I remember him explaining that there was an ambulance on site, for him, waiting in the event that he would need to be urgently rushed to hospital.

That’s not okay. These dogs are supposed to be trained to perform behaviors on cue, in specific circumstances, and not in others. Someone who is not the dog’s specific target should not be fearing for their life vaccinating these dogs. I mean seriously WTF.

As for ‘handlers misusing their aggression to cause severe bodily harm when unnecessary’, that’s not really an animal welfare issue, it’s a police brutality issue. The crux of the debate will hinge on what we consider ‘unnecessary’.

I don’t think it’s always cruel to the dog to train it to bite on command, though some methods could be. The cruelty that trained tool could potentially be used to inflict is another matter, though the judgement for those actions does not rest upon the dog.

If I had to choose, I’d probably rather a fellow human be bitten by a trained dog than shot, but I would want a good, hard look at why those were the only two options to chose from in the first place.