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While raiding the house might have been dumb, and tbh probably was, I’m pretty sure that the euthanasia was due to some kind of standard policy for animals that bite an officer, and this is a facially reasonable policy that probably shouldn’t apply to squirrels but nobody drafting it considered that the animal biting an officer would one day be a squirrel.
I wouldn't take that bet, because these rules are written with coons, rats, bats, sacks of ferrets, angry geese, and other troublemakers in mind. The weird cases are heavily overrepresented in scenarios where you end up saying "today didn't go at all well, we'd better make a department policy about purse-carried mongooses"
I suspect that a large majority of officer-biting animals are dogs, and so squirrels are a weird edge case of something common enough to have a policy over.
Yeah. You don't get weird new policies added for dog-bites-man stories, even when it might be a good idea. But you get a horngry weasel down your pants one time and suddenly you're in an OSHA brief.
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This seems personal and very heavy handed, and should be investigated.
Why try to hand wave it away?
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Then why the raccoon? There was also a case where something similar happened to lady with alpacas (https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/geronimo-post-mortem-results-alpaca-b1916386.html granted in the UK...but basically the same mindset). I also think that there are many cases where officers are bitten by dogs and cats where the animals are not euthanized. The problem is that the policy of euthanasia is running cover for the deliberate mishandling of the animals. It looks and smells like Molochian malice to this homo.
Edit: I suppose you may choose not to euthanize a registered pet who's up-to-date on their shots. So maybe the law is enforced judiciously.
There’s probably a specific carve-out for licensed and registered pets with documented vaccines, if there’s any exclusions at all. I would actually expect that a huge majority of dogs which bite police officers in the process of serving a warrant are shot on-site, and nobody cares very much because they’re dangerous ill trained dogs owned by criminals. People who license and register their pets and keep documentation of rabies vaccines, as a rule, don’t have police in their business.
I think this case is more of an exception due to the victim being oddly sympathetic than to the state being abnormally vicious.
Dogs who bite people who attack their owners are well-trained dogs.
And people do care, at least to the extent that they make fun of the police, when the police shoot a chihuahua because they were "in fear for their life".
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