Don't ditch the dogs

Carrying on the theme of giving thanks this week, especially for animals, I got involved in the #DontDitchTheDogs trend on Twitter yesterday. It seems that there’s a trend of a different sort in the UK, to cut funding for K9 units (as well as to police forces in general), and some of the various cops I follow started a campaign to raise awareness.

They actually made the number one UK trend during the period they had it going.

Anyhow, it got me thinking about service animals in general, and public-service dogs in particular. (Look, cats make excellent companions; none better. But training them to take on citizen-facing activities? Erm, not so much.)

Police dogs, drug dogs, rescue dogs, cadaver dogs, bomb sniffer dogs, military dogs, guard dogs--we owe them all a debt of gratitude.

Think about it: they do a hard and often dangerous job, going into harm’s way alongside serving officers. They go into gunfights, knife fights, riots, collapsed buildings, meth labs, war zones, scenes of terrible carnage. They face pissed-off protestors, hopped-up tweakers and crack heads, insurgents, unstable terrain, toxic substances, extremes of weather and every other kind of bad thing. Their human partners put their lives in their paws, relying on them completely; and they don’t let them down. They often are killed or wounded in the line of duty.

And they do it for love.

What the hell more could you ask from anyone?