Brickbat: Man's Best Friend

The Vacaville, California, police department says it is investigating video that shows an officer pinning down and repeatedly punching his K-9 partner. But Capt. Matt Lydon says it's too early to say if the officer committed animal abuse. He says there are times in K-9 training a dog can be struck, and he says in this instance the dog tried to bite its handler and the officer needed to establish dominance over the animal.
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The dogs lucky he didn't get shot.
They only shoot family dogs. Department policy.
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Oh and the Steelers suck. Go Browns.
This guy gets it!
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[Capt. Matt Lydon says]...the officer needed to establish dominance over the animal.
Hope neither of them are married.
Do you question Sean Connery's marriage advice?
The dog is damn lucky he wasn’t carrying a book or making any furtive movements.
Maybe the dog was holding a cell phone?
I bet the dog won't take its mask off again.
And nothing else happened.
CB
I wonder why the dog was trying to bite the cop. Because the cop was hitting him, maybe?
So, training a police dog involves punching the dog a dozen times? I don’t think so. One smack while pinning the dog would be enough. Anyone who has had multiple dogs at one time will see the dominate dog make one aggressive move and pin the less dominant dog and it ends. That is how the pack operates.
Wrong across the board. This is, once again, moral panic/acontextual stupidity. Like the people who get offended at the "cruelty" of using of front-end loaders to get fallen cows back on their feet, blissfully ignorant that a cow's chance of survival is measured in minutes-to-hours once a cow is down and getting them back on their feet improves outcomes.
Yes, training attack dogs to shrug off getting punched is par for the course. A dozen blows is questionable, but the video only shows one and the witness says "like 10" happened before the video started. It's pretty clear the officer isn't going blind rage, ground-and-pound on the dog. If the dog bites and you pin it to the ground and it continues to bite, you can't let it up without an attitude change. Personally, I prefer positional asphyxiation as the dog will generally calm down long before it dies, but I don't know/can't guarantee the dog hasn't overcome or failed to learn from that in the past. Moreover, that sort of discipline may not be amenable to use in the field, which is what these dogs are being trained for.
And, no, that's not how the pack works. They are pack animals, not herd animals. The pack doesn't obey the leader, they are subordinate to them. When a pack attacks any animal that can defend itself, the first attacker is expected to get tossed/gored/stomped/punched/etc. The pack lives and breaths by attacking in numbers. Giving up after the first attacker gets pinned is giving up the primary advantage they have. Longer than they've been domesticated, dogs have survived by exhausting prey through chase *and* fight. Now, if you've already established yourself in the pack or as an authority individually to each dog, they won't attack as it's a contest for dominance, not survival.
The officer isn't beating the dog into unconsciousness and, under other circumstances, the proper response would be 'not my dog'. There's absolutely a question as to whether police should be using dogs at all, but since they are, they are effectively livestock. Walking bags of meat being trained to throw themselves at people intended to do harm.
Owning a farm and having livestock I know why you get them on their feet. Modern veterinary care has changed much of that. So, you don’t have to lecture me about cows. The more proper term would have been cattle as cows are only the females of the species.
What I describe is exactly how the head bitch acts with the pack at my farm. She doesn’t keep biting them, just once and then pins them down. Typically she waits until the subservient dog shows it’s subservience by peeing. Packs act in pacts with prey not other pack members unless the pack member is a weakness to the pack.
The more proper term would have been cattle as cows are only the females of the species.
The overwhelming majority of downed cattle that get video taped are dairy cows. Nobody's got the time to drive out to remote stockyards to capture footage of bulls being moved around manually and, even if they did, wooden fences and open ranges don't convey the same 'evil industrial farming' narrative. Not to mention that you've got a hard push to get the whole of farming, let alone lay English speakers, on board with your semantic rigor.
Modern veterinary care has changed much of that.
Not really. The times and survivability have increased, but any animal that is unable to rise under its own power is a bad thing and cattle are still more poorly designed to be in such positions than many other animals.
Packs act in pacts with prey not other pack members unless the pack member is a weakness to the pack.
So, does the alpha or any other dog in your pack have an indicator about who or what it regards as friend/foe or packmate/prey or do you just have to infer their behavior? Again, you're talking about less rigorously-trained and more socialized animals than a military or police force would necessarily tolerate (not that the police should be using dogs).
Read about this in the Daily Mail a few weeks ago. At the time the asshole said he was training the poor animal and it wouldn't give up the toy, so he started punching the thing "according to his training."
No surprise the story has changed to biting.
"Just Maligator things..."
The former poster John had a story he told here about a Military Working Dog (might've been a Malinois, maybe some other breed) that was always muzzled. But would look at you, say if you were a veterinarian, with these sweet puppy dog eyes, and soft demeanor, hoping you would be silly enough to take it off. And when you did...it instantly morphed into a Cerberus that tried to take off any of your body parts within reach. I guess it was really good at its job.
Working dogs are just different. I haven't seen the video, and couldn't tell you whether the cop's behavior constituted abuse, or was just a hell of a lot more negative reinforcement than you see with typical domestic animal relationships. I really don't understand people who get breeds like Mals, Ovcharkas, Cane Corsos, or Filas as pets. Not like a police K-9 is a pet. Though they're great at performing the job they were bred to do.
The left hates the cops, after last Wednesday, the right hates the cops and now their dogs are turning on them.
Pelosi is jumping down the Trump impeachment rabbit hole again (even though Trump's term expires before the Senate could act), Twitter banned/censored 15,000 conservatives last week, Big Tech banned/censored Parlor yesterday, and unReason publishes this distracting fluff.
It's a Brickbat. They've always posted little bon mots like these. Lightens the mood.
Now see how the Roundup/Morning Links deals with the dire news you're talking about.
Stop resisting!
the officer needed to establish dominance over the animal
If that's their pathetic excuse, they need to re-learn all dog training and dog psychology.
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Even more starkly than their all too frequent cases of abuse of random citizens, their spouse, and their children; cops' ubiquitous animal abuse shows that some defect of the mind for innate cruelty and evil must be co-located with that which inclines them toward policing.
“There is no safety for honest men except by believing all possible evil of evil men.” ~ Edmund Burke
"Authority has always attracted the lowest elements in the human race. All through history, mankind has been bullied by scum." ~ PJ O'Rourke
This is stupid. Not the Brickbat, the Reason commentors' response.
The correct, libertarian answer is that the police shouldn't have dogs, not that the police shouldn't be allowed to train dogs using methods others might consider to be cruel. Did the officer cripple the dog physically/emotionally? If not, then it would seem that the discipline, de facto, wasn't too severe.
Where I grew up, abandoned/stray dogs would routinely wander onto the property. Some we trained to be great bird dogs. Some were rabid. Some had become too feral. Others just had bad temperament. Breeding dogs for purpose is effectively turns dogs into livestock. Anybody pretending like "Oh, all dogs can be effectively socialized." hasn't dealt with all dogs, all people who own dogs, or both. Just like there are plenty of people born or quietly and inadvertently conditioned to be sociopaths, the same holds true for dogs.
Once a dog is 75% trained to be a police dog and it's not going to make it, what's the choice? Spend more time/money untraining a dog so that normal people can own it? Let it loose so that some unsuspecting family can discover that knows how to attack and doesn't obey commands with 100% fidelity? Liquidate it?
Would the story be better if the dog failed the class, mauled a kid or bit a pedestrian and had to be put down?
"The correct, libertarian answer is that the police shouldn’t have dogs".
Don't be silly, the correct libertarian answer is that dogs shouldn't have police. If you can't train your officer and/or care for him properly, you shouldn't have one. 🙂
"... pinning down and repeatedly punching his K-9 partner."
I've owned a number of dogs, and trained them to various extents. I am by no means an expert, but I cannot imagine what this would be except loss of control on the part of the officer.
Unless someone can show me [citation, not conjecture, please] that pinning a dog down and repeatedly punching it is a valid training technique.
I am by no means an expert, but I cannot imagine what this would be except loss of control on the part of the officer.
OK, one way or another, control was lost. What's the remedy? Or rather, what are the remedies you would disallow?
[citation, not conjecture, please]
I disagree with the approach. It assumes that science dictates morality. What's the proper way to discipline a malfunctioning lamp or toaster? What's the proper way to discipline an unruly human that's trying to harm you?
Again, having adopted/taken care of abandoned dogs, what, exactly is the libertarian solution to dogs that are too disproportionately risky to be of any real benefit? Would you feel better if they were let loose and torn apart by coyotes or starved to death in the wild? Or if the officers executed them?
Personally, this feels very much like people who enjoy cheeseburgers taking offense at how ground beef is made.
Personally, this feels very much like people who enjoy cheeseburgers taking offense at how ground beef is made.
I should amend this slightly. Ignorant snobs are going to ignorant snob. This feels very much like people who pride themselves on being rational enough to allow others the freedom to eat veal or patè getting uppity because of a 'best friend' moniker.
I have no idea what you are trying to say here.
Every cop and dog needs to know how to take punches and being pinned. It’s combat training.
But _not_ to take punches from the dog's handler. That will either teach the dog that it can ignore the handler's commands so it becomes uncontrollable, or make it so terrified of enraging the handler that it will be afraid to do anything.
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