Beware Of Dog

I learned an interesting fact recently concerning our city's police dogs. It turns out that we really shouldn't go around the police dogs in our turnout gear because apparently we look like we're wearing the attack suit they train them with and they will go after us.


I find it a little disconcerting that I just learned this after ten years of working here.

Dog bites can be pretty ugly. It's gotta be scary as hell being attacked by a dog, police or otherwise. I've seen a few bad guys who got the K-9's set on them and none of them were too happy. As highly trained as they are, the K-9s are pretty single minded and not too discriminating. You really don't want to get in the way of one of them, no matter who you are.

We got called out a while back for a police dog bite. The street was closed off and blocked by police cars when we arrived on scene. We approached one of the officers to find out who our victim was. He was leaning on the hood of his patrol car and when he stood up I noticed a large tear in his pants. The pants were opened up from just below the crotch to almost the knee. It turns out this officer had got between the dog and the bad guy and the dog went for him instead. He was bit in the leg before getting the dog under control. It was one of those bites that had it been a little more posterior it could have hit an artery and had it been a little more lateral he would have been singing a lot higher. The cop had some good punctures to his inner thigh and it was already turning blue but he had no real bleeding. This is not necessarily a good thing, the lack of blood just means the germs are trapped under the skin in the punctures. This guy was tough, one of our more bad-ass cops, but he was in some pain when I cleaned up the wound. Really, all I did was rinse the wound and bandage his leg. When he gets to the hospital and they really get to cleaning that thing out he is going to be hating life, or at the very least hating that dog.