I'm formerly of the law enforcement community, and I've worked directly with K9 officers and trainers - pretty much everything being stated in that post was a crock of lies from ignorant people. K9 officers are treated as equals to human officers. They're important to us because they're our lifeline and can be the difference between life or death for both us and even the suspects - they tend to respond better with threat of dog than firearms, which usually leads to both parties living.
I’ve had the pleasure of working with our local PD and they’ve taught me a lot. I have not gotten to work with them nearly as much as I’d like, but even that small amount of time showed me things that I did not realize before. Their dogs were members of their family; when they were off duty they play with their kids, sleep in their beds, etc.
Several of the officers would come and give demonstrations to the children of a camp I used to help with, and they would get choked up talking about their dogs and the experiences they had with them.
They are not trained to be unstable monsters, it should be the exact opposite. All of the K9s who visited the camp met all of the kids, dogs with many bites under their belt loved interacting with the kids, as it should be.
That said, I know not all K9s are going to be this way. But it’s when people focus on only negative examples and act like all K9s are that way... it is frustrating. But people do that in all walks of life. I see it constantly with GSDs and people seeing sensationalized pictures/videos of badly built “crippled” dogs and now they think the whole breed is ruined. When people involved in that breed know it is not true. Same applies here.
Here’s another one of the dogs at home with his family.
These are all different dogs from just my local department alone... it’s not a fluke. It’s how it should be, a truly stable and well trained dog can differentiate a threat from a nonthreatening, friendly person and react based off the situation.
