In August, a Missouri family's dog, Parker, wandered away from the family home during a violent storm. When the neighbor who found the dog called the police for help, instead of returning Parker to his family, an officer shot him and threw his body in a ditch.
According to a lawsuit filed this week by Parker's owners, Tylla and Bryan Pennington, Stoddard County, Missouri, police officer Rodger Seal arrived at Hillary Mayberry's home after she called the sheriff's office looking for assistance with Parker. Mayberry had posted earlier on Facebook about the found dog. However, instead of helping Mayberry find Parker's owners, or even taking her to a nearby shelter, Seal took the dog to a nearby wooded area and shot him.
The lawsuit claims that Parker did not immediately die after being shot. Instead, Seal waited eight minutes before firing a second shot, which killed him. Seal then disposed of Parker's body by throwing it in a ditch.
The suit argues that there was no legal justification for Seal to kill Parker. While Stoddard County has a written policy allowing officers to shoot a "dangerous, diseased, or incapacitated animal," Parker was perfectly healthy and nonaggressive.
Instead, the complaint writes that Seal "committed the felony of Animal Abuse" when he shot the dog without provocation and allowed him to lay "suffering for 8 minutes after he was shot the first time before Defendant Seal shot Parker a second time killing him."
"On information and belief," the suit adds, "Defendant Stoddard County has an unwritten policy, pattern, and practice of regularly killing dogs and disposing of them" in rural areas.
Unfortunately, this incident is far from the first time that a police officer has killed an innocent family pet—it happens so often, there's even a "puppycide" tag on Reason's website.
In November 2021, a Michigan cop shot a dog multiple times. Footage from the incident shows that the pup in question was not aggressive but was actually wagging his tail when he was shot. Last September, Detroit cops killed a woman's dog and dumped its body in a trash can. A 2016 Reason investigation showed that Detroit cops are particularly fond of killing dogs—they shot at least 25 in 2015 alone.
Last August, an Arkansas cop tried to shoot a Pomeranian—a breed that tends to weigh only 3 to 7 pounds—but missed and struck the dog's owner. After the dog's owner yelled out that she had been shot, the cop tried to tell her that her dog had actually scratched her instead.
"[Police] don't need to be dog trainers," Cynthia Bathurst, the executive director of the animal welfare group Safe Humane, told Reason in 2016. "They just need to know what to look for and defuse or control the situation with the resources available. It's the compassionate and right thing to do. It's better for community relations. And if that doesn't move them, the huge lawsuits should."
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