Animal advocates stress the need for officer training sessions to reduce dog shootings.
BUFFALO, N.Y. — There is another issue for police officers that has again surfaced with a Buffalo officer fatally shooting a city resident’s dog, which charged at him back in June.
2 On Your Side spoke with the leader of an animal advocacy organization that is calling for more training of police to prevent such tragic encounters for pet owners and themselves.
A Buffalo Police report indicates this incident happened June 28 at a home on Newburgh Avenue as a police officer was distributing brochures warning against use of fireworks.
In body cam video obtained by Channel 2 in a Freedom of Information Law request, the officer noticed two “very large breed” dogs behind a backyard fence, but suddenly they got through the gate and ran toward him.
The officer ran from the driveway up to a front porch, but the dogs continued toward him, and the report said he was forced to fire his weapon and kill one of the dogs to “protect himself.”
It is no surprise to some animal advocates who say U.S. Justice Department reports show up to 10,000 dogs killed by police in the U.S. each year.
Animal Legal Defense Fund Executive Director Chris Green told us, “The number one reason a police officer in the United States fires his weapon is to shoot at a dog.”
Green added, “A lot of people get very agitated about the police officers in these cases, and sometimes there’s wrongdoing, but in many cases it’s just a lack of training. They haven’t been shown how do it any different, and they’re in a split-second situation, and they reach for the tool they know, which is their gun.”
Green says training — usually a short class in how to de-escalate in such officer-dog interactions — is required for police by law in states like Texas and Colorado, and it can dramatically reduce the number of dogs killed.
A 2014 Channel 2 report looked at the issue then connected to police raids of drug houses where drug dealers were known to use the animals as weapons or security. After a revelation that one officer alone had shot 26 dogs, video training in animal behavior was actually established for the BPD.
A city spokesman currently in 2025 made no reference to such training and points out the actions of the officer in the June case were deemed to be justified and that the police procedures manner allows for use of a weapon in such cases.
Green of Animal Legal Defense Fund says often lawsuits against police departments and communities change policies about officers shooting dogs, and there may be other factors with shots fired at a fast moving animal.
“You have an officer firing their weapon in a populated area. What could possibly go wrong? So there’s bystanders that get shot. There’s the complainant themselves that called and they’ve been shot. The police officers have shot themselves or other officers,” Green said.
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