His name was Teddy, a Shih Tzu, deaf and blind. He escaped his kennel, and a neighbor who saw him wandering called the police because the small Missouri town doesn’t have an animal control officer.
The cop spent all of three minutes trying to lasso Teddy with one of those poles that animal control officers use, but not succeeding, shot and killed him (read story here or here).
Teddy wasn’t aggressive and didn’t try to bite the cop. He could’ve picked him up. Or if he had waited a few minutes, the owner’s partner would’ve arrived and caught him. Instead, the impatient cop killed little Teddy.
You’ll hear two shots in the video (at about the 5:30 mark), but won’t see the dog being shot, although you’ll see its body being dumped in a cooler (at about the 7:50 mark). Later in the video, the cop argues with the owner’s distraught partner .
The cop claimed he didn’t know the dog’s “condition,” thought it might be sick or injured, so BAM! BAM! put it out of its misery. Teddy was not sick or injured. It’s another case of a cop with an itchy trigger finger filling in an information gap with bullets and sorting it out later.
Here’s how it’s sorting out: The townspeople are outraged (watch video here), the mayor resigned, the cop is on administrative leave, and the town is facing a lawsuit (story here). Maybe the cop should’ve tried harder to catch the dog? Or tried to find the owner? Or maybe not been a cop in the first place, if he can’t do any better than this?