Auburn Player Bitten by Police Dog

Anyone watching the Auburn - Alabama game on Saturday evening will probably recall near the end of the game that an Auburn player was bitten by a police dog. Here is the clip from YouTube (altered by some smartass Alabama fan no doubt to include the UGA bulldog's attempted attack on an Auburn player).



It doesn't matter what team the bitten player was playing for. What matters is that cop did not have his animal under control and someone was injured because of it. If you watch that video closely you see how hard the player had to snatch his hand to get it out of the dogs mouth. Later see him looking at his hand again. It's lucky he had a glove on. That probably saved him a lot damage. What if he had been a star QB on his way to the NFL and that dog had bitten his hand and ruined his career?

That particular kind of dog is a Belgian Malinois, closely related to a German Shepherd. I have a German Shepherd and for those of you who might say "It was only a nip" let me tell you that was way more than a nip. These dogs have huge, powerful jaws lined with razor sharp teeth meant for ripping and tearing flesh & bone. They know how to nip (mine does when he is pretending to herd the kids about like sheep)and they know how to snap to break bones and hang on. That dog attacked that player.

It's not the dogs fault though. Someone on an email list that I am on raised the question about why there are police dogs at a college football game to begin with? I'm sure if we asked we would be told they are there for crowd control and coach protection. But really high-strung dogs who are sensitive to large crowds and high levels of noise are not the kinds of dogs that need to be used in a stadium crowd situation. I can't imagine my dog there. He would be unmanagable. He would have also have bitten anyone who got that close to his owner/handler. The player was moving very fast toward the handler, the crowd was yelling and the dog was extremely excited because of all the stimulation. The handler should have been prepared for that and managed his dog. He no longer needs to be a dog handler. These kinds of canines are LETHAL in the hands of someone who cannot control them in every situation.