No doubt...I think we going to hear a bit more about “police dog training”...
Here’s another article on it:
http://www.ajc.com/news/content/news/stories/2008/04/28/trooperdog_0428.html
Dog handlers for the North Carolina State Highway Patrol have stunned dogs with Tasers, swung them by their leashes until they became airborne and hit them with plastic bottles full of pebbles.
None of that was an issue until a trooper used his cellphone to record a video of a sergeant kicking his police dog repeatedly while it was leashed to a loading dock, its hind legs just touching the ground. The video was made public for the first time Monday, and it shows Sgt. Charles L. Jones kicking Ricoh, a 7-year-old Belgian Malinois, five times, causing the dog to swing as much as two feet under the loading dock.
Jones, a 14-year patrol member, was fired last September after the incident became public. Now he is trying to win back his job at a hearing before a state administrative judge.
Police dogs can be lethal weapons, and Jones contends that training them to obey commands can be a rough business. He argues that once his tactics were recorded on video, there was no way public officials from the governor on down would acknowledge that they were accepted practice.
His defence is that this is past and accepted practice...
I surmise that he is truthful in this instance in the admission that there is a pattern of abuse present in the training program...
I bet even money it’s covered up...
The fact that dogs were ever trained at all prior to the invention of the taser suggests to me that this was completely unnecessary; likewise, I can't see any value in swinging a dog; however, BRIEFLY suspending a dog by his neck can be an attention getter for an intractable dog, especially one that has difficulties around other dogs, horses, etc. I wouldn't suggest this for a companion dog, but I think it is appropriate for a patrol dog that has to be relied on to not go haywire when another animal shows up in a crowd situation. Throwing a bottle of pebbles? I can see tossing an object at a dog to get his attention off of some distraction, a plastic bottle with some pebbles would also have some rattle to it...I guess it "depends on what your definition of 'throw' is..." Lobbing it at a dog I could see...winding up and beaning the dog with a Nolan Ryan special...Absolutely NO WAY.