Ignoring the use of some inflammatory wording within the article, do you agree or disagree with the final and decisive action that the Police took?
I'm with the Police on this one and have commented as such below the article, however I appear to be in the minority. What say you?
Hard to disagree with OP , else i'd be placing the value of the lives of human beings = the life of one dog.
Probably a bad choice in forums to choose for opinions and I can't say I'd agree as there are other options that should have been used first by the police. I will say it is a known fact that swerving to avoid an animal has resulted in many deaths and over here you are supposed to hit the animal as your life comes first. Police though have the ability to stop traffic and it may inconvenience some maybe mostly Porsche and BMW drivers with tight underwear.
Considering that it was apparently in the early hours of the morning, so at a time that traffic would have been at a minimum, it does not seem to me likely to be genuinely justified. It may have been the easy solution but not, I suspect, genuinely justified on safety grounds.
Unfortunately I wasn't there so I can only guess as to the real circumstances.
** edit **
In fact, the more I think about the more it seems to me that it is implausible that killing the dog was the only safe option. The easiest option, sure, but implausible that it was the only safe option.
Last edited by markrlondon; 24th February 2016 at 06:59.
The Daily Post make a plausible case for the police officers' actions. But then reinforce it with a picture of a busy A55 when the incident took place at 3am. Subtle but they've just overdone it in my view.
Not that it really makes any difference but I assume it was a family pet, probably scared and just wanting to get home and lay on the sofa. I'm sure there would have been other options. I mean it wasn't a Bengal Tiger roaming the motorway was it.?
Sorry disagree.
On balance probably the right choice.
Andy
Wanted - Damasko DC57
Sounds like woof justice to me
Very paw!
I know for a fact that the police will now receive hundreds of letters from members of the public unimpressed at the course of action taken.
When I was with Notts police a few years ago, they built both a new kennel block and a new cell block. They advertised for lay inspectors to periodically review the facilities and they got hundreds of applications for the kennels, but hardly any for the prisoner cell block...
The British public do love their animals.
I'd guess it was a hard decision that had to be made quickly as their takeaway was getting cold.
Agreed.Originally Posted by markrlondon
As was mentioned the police can safely stop traffic.
Furthermore indeed not a Bengal Tiger and lastly bullets are not safe when they have left the barrel at speed.
Just trigger happy vasals.
Given that the Police and Traffic officers close motorways or use moving road blocks at the drop of a hat these days, at first glance this this sounds unnecessary.
I think this was justified...
...the fact that the dog managed to bite one of the police officers means they had tried to 'apprehend' it normally at some stage. Not practical to try and get a vet to tranquilise it as traffic was already swerving to avoid it and therefore over the following couple of hours traffic levels would have increased substantially.
Probably MORE dangerous in light traffic conditions as cars are moving faster.
My thoughts exactly.
When you look long into an abyss, the abyss looks long into you.........
N. Wales Police are a clown outfit, the joke of UK policing they rarely get anything right, and this is no different..
Decisive decision making. I'm sure it wasn't something that the police officers enjoyed. They had tried to capture the dog. They did the right thing IMO.
It's a matter of risk - i run the dog over every day of the week if i thought it was safest to humans.
Agreed. I'm surprised that the officers were dog owners. As a dog owner myself, it would at no point enter my head to mow the animal down with a car. Kind of reminds me of some of the grizzly inventive capital punishment that is sanctioned by uncivilized backward governments such as Saudi Arabia and the United States of America.
It would have been run over in the end anyway.
Not if they'd have shut the road like they do for so many other more trivial things.
Perhaps some in-car video might become available to support their actions... but of course if it doesn’t support their actions, we’ll never see it.
Impossible to make any meaningful comment unless some impartial witnesses emerge, but my gut feeling is that there must surely have been safer options - driving a car into a foxhound-sized dog at speed (if that is even what happened) is itself not without risk, whoever the driver is.
What I want to know is - who owned the dog and why was it not being properly cared for? Presumably it belonged to a local hunt. I’d like to see the owners identified, charged, and made liable for the costs.
This ^^^^I've been stuck in traffic jams at peak time for more ridiculous reasons.
Wow, two large jumps to conclusion in one go?What I want to know is - who owned the dog and why was it not being properly cared for? Presumably it belonged to a local hunt.
Shit happens, even attentively hovered over young humans can go walkabout in the blink of an eye and dogs are a good deal more athletic/quick.
+1
It seems to me that the Police are in a no-win situation in that they will get grief from whichever part of the population disagrees with the action they took.
I’m not jumping to conclusions. If a dog is loose, with no owner around, near or on a busy road, then the owner has to bear some responsibility. And while it might be different in Spain, I suspect that in the UK the majority of foxhounds (for that is the breed mentioned in the reports that I have read) are part of a pack rather than in domestic ownership.
I made it quite clear in my post that my comments were speculative and I deeply resent the way in which you have turned towards personal criticism.
I think it would take a particularly strange character to be able to get in a car and deliberately run over a dog. Perhaps the policeman was peed off that the dog had bitten him and it was an act of anger?
Isn't the make of dog a foxhound?, not that it IS a working foxhound with a hunt?
whatever the circumstances it's a shame.
mike
Dear Si, you wrote 'not properly cared for'.
You assumed it is from a hunt.
I think that jumping to conclusion twice. It even includes a harsh judgement.
You resenting my opinion, that is something YOU do.
Tans pis.
I suggest you go for a walk with the dog and throw some sticks for it to retrieve. On the other hand, what if it runs over the road... Nah, better take a nice cuppa Si.
Ok, nice diversion Si.
Let's get back to the matter at hand; the police shooting a dog.
I think they ran it over Petrus, not shoot it.
mike
I’m not jumping to conclusions. If a dog is loose, with no owner around, near or on a busy road, then the owner has to bear some responsibility.
Not an area I know a lot about - but this would be (I think) covered both by straight forward tort of negligence - depending on where the owner lives relative to the motorway and how they have secured the animal and also The Animals Act (1971) which (and I haven't read it in a long time) which imposes a duty on animal owners.
I think I can see why your initial reply took the form that it did: you haven’t even read about the matter being discussed.
I would prefer it if they didn't close the road though.
If they had been armed I would have been unconcerned if they had simlpy shot it. As it was I have they did not cause much unnecessary or costly damage to the police car.
I know there are plenty of dog lovers here but I expect they don't let their dogs roam the motorway. It's just another animal and unless there are vegetarians or Buddhists on here I don't see why people should get so het up.
Now if it was ducklings or kittens crossing the road, that would be a completely different matter!
Maybe the owner should have brained it at birth.
I don't think they had any choice.
To shoot a running dog effectively is very, very difficult - especially at night. Unless you use a shotgun which would almost certainly not kill outright.
By the time they'd gone to get a vet with a tranquilliser gun the dog could have cause a major accident. And even if they'd managed it, they'd still have the problem of hitting a moving target at night.
Closing the road...hmmm...I suspect it's easier said than done. When it's done for an accident, the accident isn't sprinting along at 20mph, it's stationary.
Sad for the dog, sad for the owner (I imagine) and very sad for the guy who had to hit it.
I'd have hated to do it.
I agree totally, I have seen instances of the Highways agency closing motorways for 24 hr for less!
According to local radio here, postings on the North Wales Police's Facebook page have been antagonistic by and large (can't be arsed to go and look as I'll probably need to know the Welsh for Facebook).
I wonder if North Wales police's zero-tolerance attitude towards speeding, which apparently ignores the generally accepted guidelines of 10% +2mph, has any bearing on locals' attitudes? Just thinking aloud.
Also, if the poor dog was a hunt hound, has there been any comment from that fraternity? If memory serves me well, hunting hounds are regarded as disposable, and, like racing greyhounds, tend not to fare well in the 'humane despatch' stakes.
Wouldn't be at all surprised......
I've little doubt, this will do their public relations a lot of harm..
The poor dog probably has a speeding ticket in the post...
Were there any independent witnesses, I wonder? At 03:00 there probably weren’t many people around ;) but given their rush to go public on the matter they must have been worried that someone witnessed the episode. Or perhaps there is some video evidence to support their claims about what happened?
I think this force have some history of this sort of thing - tasering sheep and other nonsense.
It also makes me think what would have happened if it wasn't killed instantly....were there vets at hand to dispatch it if need be?
Dogs are one of the most resilient creatures on earth and would surmise that it would of been luck to kill it first attempt.
We had this, but with a loose horse outside our house a few years back, which is on a very busy road just before rush hour. Cars were swerving around it while it ran up and down the road out of control, it was not nice to see.
My wife managed to get hold of the horse and temporarily pen it into a neighbours garden as we didn't know where it had come from. When the police arrived a few minutes later, they closed the whole road (after the horse was already safe), including a cross roads at the bottom of the hill (now at rush hour) so that we could walk the horse down the middle of the road to a local farm stables while the owner was found.
The police certainly did the right thing in our case.
Maybe a horse was just too big for the police to run over?
Or maybe the decision to run over the dog was taken very quickly, in the heat of the moment, which maybe wasn't the only (or 'best') option. This may be more explainable if it was a traffic cop, who I suspect are probably trained to use their cars both aggressively & defensively as part of their role.
As others have already said, there will always be decisions that were made in a hurry, which may seem utterly wrong with the benefit of hindsight. Either way I am sure they would be criticised if they didn't get the dog under control and someone was killed in a crash.
It does seem like a rather strange decision to take.....
There are several cases of escaped cows being shot.
sometimes you have to make a decision with no time to think, but you do what you thinks best.
and sometimes it comes back on you
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lee_Clegg
Some comment from the hunt concerned in this article:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-wales-n...wales-35650395
The reaction is probably exactly what they anticipated, hence the early public statements. I do of course appreciate that this may have been a very risky situation for the officers. The other unknown quantity is that there could well have been other demands on their time.
I am still leaning towards the “other options might have been feasible” side.
A little bit less of this then can't be all bad.......
The A55 in that area is a major holiday route in the summer, and as such there are now quite a few matrix signs that are used to warn of congestion, accidents, bad weather etc....
At 3am in the morning the main users of that road will be trucks travelling to or from Hollyhead..... And there won't be that many...
I don't see why the signs couldn't have been used, and an alternative to running the dog over found.....
Then again I consider N wales police to be the armpit of UK policing, and am not surprised they chose the option they did..
Apawling (sorry, I know, poor pooch) however when I was taught to drive I was told to hit a small-ish animal rather than swerve so it might be the less of two evils esp if some one would try to avoid the poor thing and end up in the dich. Just saying.
Terrible choice and judgement. Could easily have been better managed. Brute force from the prats in blue as usual.
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