A federal judge once described police shootings of pet dogs as an "epidemic." The Department of Justice's own community-policing office has estimated that American law enforcement officers shoot dogs thousands of times each year. Yet no federal agency counts these incidents, almost no police department publishes them, and in most of the country an officer who shoots a family's dog in its own yard faces no review that the public ever sees.
Dead Puppies exists to keep the record that the government won't.
Every entry on this site documents one incident in which a government agent — usually a police officer or sheriff's deputy, sometimes another public employee — shot, killed, or injured a dog. Every entry is built exclusively from published news reporting and court records, which are linked at the bottom of each article. And every entry tracks the part of the story that usually goes unreported: what happened afterward. Was the officer disciplined? Charged? Was the family paid a settlement — with public money? Did a court strip the officer of qualified immunity, or grant it?
The pattern those outcomes form is the point of this site. Read any single entry and you may see a tragedy. Read a hundred and you will see a policy.
The name
The name of this site is blunt because the subject is blunt. These were pets — dogs named Angelo, Lola, Duke, Chico, Jax — shot in their own yards, on their own porches, through their own fences, very often while officers were at the wrong address or responding to a call that had nothing to do with the dog. We decline to soften that.
What this site is not
This is not a harassment campaign, and it must never become one. We do not publish home addresses, phone numbers, family information, or any other personal details about the officers named here. We name officers only when court records or professional news reporting have already named them. We do not call for any action against any individual. The remedy this site argues for is institutional: mandatory reporting, mandatory training in non-lethal dog encounters, and real consequences decided by courts, departments, and voters.
Contact
Corrections and tips: [email protected]. If you are a journalist, researcher, or attorney, the underlying database is available on request.