I suspect that if you started yelling in a foreign language while one of these teams was trying to secure your house, you'd end up just as dead as your dog.
There's a difference between a stern command, and crazed yelling.
I keep forgetting that not everyone has combat experience and the ability to remain calm in tense situations.
Besides, any reasonable person who felt threatened by my dog(s) would see the results of my commands and the situation would thereby pose no threat to the police.
From there I could tell the dogs to play dead and further defuse the situation.
The bottom line is that dog owners need to maintain control of their dogs at all times.
There are too many dunderheads out there who think it's cool to have a bad ass dog yet have no idea about how to maintain those dogs in a proper fashion.
Living in the country, as I have for most of my life, we don't see too many of these types of police actions, as being in such a close-knit community, everyone knows what everyone else is up to, so the police in this county rarely, if ever, break down the wrong door.
I have a long driveway and can see who is coming up to the house from quite a distance, so I don't see how anyone could storm my house without being seen, and once I've identified the interlopers as police I would make sure to place my dogs in their kennels.
I guess that's why I live where I do. I like it this way.
This is not meant to be a defense of the reprehensible police tactics outlined in the article, but rather an example of one way to deal with one's dog(s) in a responsible manner.
I think most of what you are saying is at best orthogonal to the article, where the dogs were not in any way 'bad ass dogs not under control' but simply stupid little house dogs that were in some cases actually /running away/ when they were shot, and the people were not getting in trouble for being threatening in any way but for not being fast enough to lie still and silent on the ground. It's obviously unlikely that you will ever be in this situation, but if it did happen I don't believe it would go as smoothly as you seem to think.
It doesn't matter if the dog is lying still or not. They will just shoot it because they've got combat high. It happens to everyone, even seasoned veterans.
