Cop charged by dog, fires weapon

While the chicken owner and police officers described the dogs as pit bulls, their owner, Katie Ford, said the mother-daughter pair were registered American bull dogs.

The Dalles Police Capt. Steve Baska said he came around a corner and found the mother dog feeding on a chicken and it immediately growled and ran toward him. As he rapidly backpedaled, he shot three rounds: the first one missing; the second one “creasing its neck”; and the third one “hit next to her, which sent her running,” he said.

Baska estimated the dog was just 15 feet away from him when he fired on it. The other dog wasn’t a threat because it got trapped in the small coop where they had killed the chickens.

“I was trying to hit her but that’s where it landed,” Baska said of the missed shots. “I wasn’t firing any warning shots.”

Several other city officers — one on foot, the others in vehicles — gave chase to the dog, pursuing it for several blocks before cornering it, tasing it several times, and then using catch poles to hold it until its owners arrived, he said.

Then the owners took them to a veterinarian to be put down, Baska said.

Ford said she and her husband are responsible pet owners – the dogs were in a kennel inside a fenced yard ─ but it can happen that dogs escape enclosures.

“We feel terribly for what happened with our neighbor,” she said. “We’re going to replace her livestock. We feel terribly about this and we put them down because of that.”

On the earlier attack on the horses, police said at 4:20 a.m. on Aug. 29, they received a report the dogs chased and attacked two horses in their enclosure a block from the dogs’ home. The horses had three injuries, two to legs and one to a head, and one of the dogs had face injuries, presumably from getting kicked by horses, according to The Dalles Police Detective Sgt. Doug Kramer.

Ford contended the dogs did not attack the horses, but chased them along the fence. She was recently in court for a dog at large ticket in that matter. They were ticketed again for this latest incident, and will resolve both cases at once, she said.

Baska said, “You know how we love our dogs, but the owners did the right thing. They made the decision, it wasn’t our decision, and they’re making everything right with the victim, the owner of the chickens. It’s just a sad event, I’m a dog guy.”

Ford said the younger of the two bull dogs, Sadie, didn’t like being kenneled and had chewed a hole in the chain-link kennel and both dogs escaped. They had even reinforced the kennel to prevent escape.

Her family also owns another dog, an indoor dog, and she said “in the 12 years that we’ve owned these dogs, they’ve never gotten out, never been a complaint, never been a problem, until the last couple of weeks. I run a day care and they’ve never been aggressive toward people.”

The chickens were on a property at 10th and Myrtle. The chicken owner called police when the dogs attacked.

Ford said, “I have no issue with the fact that they shot our dog. I have no issue with that. We understood that. And we are grateful that there were no people involved and that it was chickens, and that can be rectified. We don’t have any issue with what the officer had to do, but I will tell you, every time the officers have had to talk to us the officers have referred to the dogs as pit bulls. They are not pit bulls.”

She said, “We want to be clear, just because they’re big dogs we don’t think they should be treated differently.”

She added, “It would be disappointing to me if this article is really derogatory toward” larger animals like hers. “I’ve known instances where little dogs have done damage as well.” She said her cat was killed by a small terrier once. “It can happen. It is in their nature.”

Baska was empathetic toward the dogs, saying, “You have to understand the mentality of dogs. This could be a very loving family dog, but when they’re on top of their kill and you come upon it, they’re going to protect it.”

He said the city’s animal control officer said the dogs “were friendly when she was with them after the event. You know, it’s sad, when dogs get out, they get in a pack mindset and they do stuff.”

While citizens sometimes report to police hearing possible shots fired – and it is usually unfounded, or sometimes fireworks -- Baska said nobody called police after he fired his weapon three times.

It is rare for city police to fire weapons at animals. Baska said, “about 30 years ago, I had a shepherd-wolf mix and another dog attack me on some bluffs above Second Street. I actually just shot around in the ground to get him off my leg.”

In more recent years, one officer had to shoot a pit bull off another officer. In that case, police got a report of a vicious dog trapping an elderly man in his truck. One of the officers began backpedaling and fell to the ground and the dog attacked him, causing his fellow officer to shoot it.

Baska pepper-sprayed a dog 25 years ago, and more recently pepper sprayed another dog.

The incident Thursday “got my blood pressure up a little bit,” he said, “but I have pills for that. I’m not kidding; I have pills for that.”