Just a reminder that K9s and police dogs are not cute. They are not “uwu smol pupper bean trying their best!1!1!” They are a twisted and evil creation of white supremacy and police violence. They are abused, tortured, and trained to maul victims to death unless they are removed with brute force. They are trained to attack harder if the victim adopts a defensive (nonthreatening) strance. They are *racist*, frequently trained to be particularly violent to black folks. And the vast majority of them are abused and euthanized. Remember this the next time you see a seeminly cute picture of a German Shepherd puppy in a too-large K9 vest: that dog is going to be trained to murder and brutalize, it is going to be tortured throughout training and service, and it will be killed just as thoughtlessly as its victims when it is no longer of use.
K9 units are police brutality.
The woman who runs the dog training facility that I’ve worked at has a rescue shepherd who failed out of K-9 unit training. Meaning that he didn’t tolerate the abuse he was put through.
This poor dog, while he’s doing so much better years down the line, took a long time to not be wary of everyone and everything. And because he’d had some attack training, him being wary meant that he’d attack. The K-9 unit training made this dog afraid of the world and the only thing the dog knew how to do to make scary things stop was to attack.
He’s still reactive and still extremely cautious of people he doesn’t know and can still flip into that attack mode if a lot of care isn’t given to reading his body language and understanding when he’s even the slightest bit tense so that he can be excused from the situation. All because of what was done to him through K-9 unit training.
The abuse from K-9 unit training stays with these dogs their whole lives. It’s cruel and heartless what these dogs go through, and it’s just as cruel and heartless what these dogs end up doing to people because of that training.