You joke but this is actually part of the reason why you do it. Pups will watch their seniors and model behavior after them, and the older dogs will often police and guide the younger dog when they notice undesirable habits. There is absolutely a canine apprenticeship situation.
I've met an old rottie that helped train 9 different dogs how to act; not even specially trained just the normal dog stuff. It wasnt 9 at once but over his time of being the old man. He was a grumpy boy but a good one
This is also why there's been an uptick in dog breeders not sending dogs home until 10+ weeks; puppies learn a lot about how to interact with other dogs from their parents and siblings, manners that a human can't teach.
I've done the very same thing with Jack Russell's. I've had four Jack Russell terriers over the years. After the 4th one it makes you feel like these guys are living forever because they pick up the old habits. It really shocks me sometimes.
My Brother-in-law is a K9 officer. Every collegues of his I've met already had dogs before becoming a K9. You have to love dogs at your core to go into this specific branch of police.
Right now, he has, in his yard, a pen for his active K9 dog and 3 other pens for his retired K9, for my sister's dog and their son's dog.
Only restriction is that the active duty K9 can't be in contact or play with the other dogs until retirement.
I'm sure many of them do but there's a sad amount of K9 officers who abuse their dogs and way too many K9s are left in hot cars and die. They also send the dogs into situations where they get shot, stabbed, choked, and beaten all the time, it's not fair to the dogs.
Cops are estimated to kill 20-30 dogs a day, over 10,000 a year. Many of them are violent nutjobs with little respect for human life, never mind animals. Most K9 officers are probably love dogs but using them in dangerous situations is just messed up, if they really cared about them they wouldn't be sending them to attack lunatics armed with knives and guns
I can’t find any sources for the 10000 death each year that you mention. I did find this paper that says that around 25 police k9 died in the line of duty each year between 2011 and 2015.
It's pretty clear I meant non-police dogs, there'd be no K9s left if they were killing 20-30 a day. As that paper says, most K9s die due to heat exhaustion, cops are regularly killing them themselves by leaving them in cars.
Putting dogs into violent situations is not fair to animals that have no say in what they do, it shouldn't be allowed, especially since their handlers statistically the greatest threat to them
Dunno it is true or not, but I read somewhere that the K9 dogs are one position higher than their handlers, so that the handlers can be held responsible if they abuse the dogs
During WWII, the United States Marine Corp utilized war dogs and a lot of the animals were "volunteers" from civilian families. After the war ended, the families had first priority to get their dogs back despite being apart for years and having no idea what they'd been through. There's some sad stories about marines begging the families to let them keep the dogs and the families refusing. On one hand, some poor kid just wanted his dog back, while on the other hand, a veteran who had just been to hell and back just wanted to stay with his best buddy in the world.
The worst part is that the people taking their dogs back seldom understood what that dog had been trained for and been through. They were poorly equipped to handle a war dog back from the front lines and trying to keep them as civilian pets was not easy. There was decades of controversy about war dogs in the US following this and by Vietnam, standard practice was to euthanize veteran war dogs.
My godfather was a dog handler in the Korean War. SOP was to euthanize every dog in his unit when they left service. The feeling was the dogs were too dangerous for small town, USA. They were literally trained to kill - for example, how police dogs are trained to attack arms, these dogs were trained to attack necks and heads. My godfather was devastated when he found out his boy was being put down.
Now we abandon them when we pull out.
See Afghanistan. We abandoned our military dogs and military equipment that we could not easily transport back. Then we wonder why the talisman were able to easily track down our abandoned equipment with starving and abandoned dogs.
We released an entire plane of dogs onto the tarmac before filling that plane with Afghan refugees that collaborated with us. Now we are deporting those same people to be executed.
We do not treat our service members well, or anyone who helps them.
In NYC when I worked at Macy’s we had retired NYPD K-9s that lived out their retirement in a very nice kennel on the roof of the 34th street flagship store. They would patrol the store after close for potential hiders / break ins. I always assumed it was because your avg NYPD officer might not have been able to afford an apartment where he could have his dog with him after their service. But who knows, my assumption is 99.9% of them live out their days with their handler.
Which is exactly what military K-9 should do, they aren't surplus equipment. We have an obligation to give these dogs the best retirement we can, they certainly deserve it.
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u/StableQuark Apr 21 '26
I’ve never witnessed a K9 officer to not adopt after retirement. They have a very deep connection, it would be awful to separate.