I agree 99% of the time.
But the situation I’m thinking about is if a person came on to my very rural property and started attaching my dog. In that kind of conflagration, I would consider shooting to warn. It could startle enough that my dog could escape, or the person might come to their senses.
And I think my initial response about it easier to shoot a person that another animal was extreme. Animal cruelty is a hot button issue with me.
Not me but ------- I’m thinking a lot would depend on the where. Someone enters your home or yard and proceeds to try to knife your dog and you are probably free and clear even if he made no direct threat to you. Protecting your property within your property. But there is going to be some differences from place to place.
Walk down the street and have someone attack your dog and you shoot him; there are going to be questions. And some of them are going to seem unfair. Type of lead/leash, your control of the dog, and more. Did your dog act aggressively towards him? If your dog is a pit bull or a shepherd you may get a closer look than if it was a spaniel. The claim will be the man could have seen your dog as a threat and was only defending himself with reasonable force when you shot him. Chances are the charge wouldn’t be murder though - more like manslaughter. But so much depends on local variables that I don’t want to speculate much beyond that.
Totally agree with this.
Hypothetical encounter. You see someone sneaking around on your property out a window. You go retrieve a rifle and a wearable camera. (after all, the biggest danger to your safety if you use a firearm to defend yourself is not the other guy’s gun, it’s the legal system)
By the time you are done armoring up, you find the perpetrator has grabbed the family dog and is in the process of retrieving a large knife from his belt to stab the dog with.
So you’ve got an individual on your property with a deadly weapon. You brandish your rifle and tell the person to stop, catching the whole thing on camera.
Person isn’t listening. Hmm. After he gets done stabbing your dog to death, what might happen next…?
Anyways, if you had a video camera covering you, I suspect you could now open fire and you’re gonna be fine. If you don’t have such a camera, the bad guy not having a gun, the knife might look really small once the guy isn’t brandishing it, the family dog is alive, it turns out the bad guy is actually a part time Sheriff’s deputy with a good reputation…
I’m certain the legal answer varies by jurisdiction.
I don’t think I would kill a person to protect my cat, but that’s not a legal answer, that is just because I doubt I could bring myself to kill a person in time to do so. And perhaps I’d rather not, too. I would prefer to avoid killing people, even if that leads to bad consequences.
This thread morphed into a discussion about killing humans to protect a pet, and that really wasn’t my question. Here’s the question again, this time with a hypothetical example…
I’m walking my dog down the street, he’s on a leash, and I see something in the distance coming towards me. I quickly realize it’s a pit bull (sorry pit bull owners, but I’ve seen this happen before), and I can tell it’s heading directly toward my Jack Russell Terrier. He doesn’t have a prayer. I have a CCW and brandish my pistol. I try to call off the attacking dog, but it keeps coming toward my dog. I AM NOT IN DANGER, unless I try to intervene with the pit bull which would be foolish at best. As the pit pull approaches, say within 3 feet of my dog, I carefully aim my gun and pull the trigger. The dog dies instantly. The pit bull owner comes running over and accuses me of murdering his defenseless dog. My dog is fine, the attack has been thwarted.
Is there any way I could be arrested for defending my dog with deadly force, firing a weapon within city limits notwithstanding?
Possibly not arrested, but wide open for a civil suit, because you had a number of other options available to you that you didn’t exercise. You could have picked up your dog and hastened in the other direction, you could have picked up your dog and tossed it on top of a nearby parked car, if this was a business neighborhood you could have entered a nearby business, etc. If the owner was close enough to ‘come running over’ then they had to have been in sight- did you yell out to them?
Many years ago I tangled with a Rottweiler that would lay in wait outside the house I was living in and attack my lab-shepherd mix. The Rottie never tried to get me, but he was hell-bent on getting my dog, and it’s not like we could solve the problem by taking another direction- he would literally hide in the bushes outside the house, and you never knew when he’d be there. After thumping him hard on the head with my walking stick, he decided to go terrorize someone else. It never dawned on me to use deadly force.
ETA: one other thing- how did you know the dog was a threat? Was he growling and snapping, or just running toward you? He may have just wanted to play, or sniff your dog, and you’ve just shot and killed him for being a dog.
And in my first post, this is why I would shoot a human before I would shoot another dog.
My Wife was an animal control officer. At one point they wanted them to carry firearms. She wouldn’t do it with out a LOT more money. Way to much more responsibility and a real pain in the ass.
Not trying to be an internet tough guy, but I have broken up a number of dog fights just by sliding in to the fray and scaring the dogs to believe that they have something much bigger to worry about. They have always gone to their corners.
Not recommended unless you can be really really scary and loud. Like scaring a bear off.
There’s no mistaking when a dog is running to greet your dog and when it is intending to attack. If a dog is running full steam towards your dog and growling it’s not a friendly visit. Sure, you could pick up your dog and hold it, but then you are in no position to protect yourself or fight back should the attacking dog jump up to attack you holding your dog. If I could pick out the owner I would yell at him to control his dog, but I’m not going to assume that’s going to work and lose my pet in the process.
I know maybe 100 people who would be this stupid & I would let try to harm one of my critters that I would not shoot PDQ if they could talk fast enough and I did not witness the start of the problem… ( Bawahahahah, yeah, somebody on my place & I don’t know it !!! Bawahahahah ) Anyway, all my bazillion relatives would not even get into a situation where this could even happen.
Anyway, all others, I do not think are worth more than my animals.
There are a lot of folks like this/me around out in the county.
Truly bad or dangerous dogs are kept up and most know where, who, what they look like and you are more likely to find an Unicorn or Morel mushrooms in plain sight than one of those animals loose.
Everyone has different lines about who & what they will defend with lethal force. Just never make the assumption that they agree with you and obey laws like you do.