Reese's weighed nine pounds.

The Chihuahua was the subject of a call to the Faulkner County Sheriff's Office on January 4, 2019 — a report of a loose, aggressive dog in the Shiloh Estates neighborhood of Conway, Arkansas. Deputy Keenan Wallace responded to that call, and before the encounter was over he had shot Reese's in the head.

The dog survived — shot through the head and jaw, and still alive. Wallace's account was that the dog lunged. The caretaker disputed that. And video of the encounter existed, spread, and drew widespread outrage.

What followed was consequence, swift and on the record.

The sheriff fired Wallace within days. The stated reason deserves close reading: numerous missed chances to de-escalate. That is not a finding that the dog was harmless. It is a finding that a trained deputy, confronting a nine-pound Chihuahua, passed up opportunity after opportunity to resolve the encounter without putting a bullet in the animal's head. His own sheriff counted the exits and concluded Wallace took none of them.

The firing was not the end. Wallace was charged with misdemeanor animal cruelty — a criminal charge against a law enforcement officer for a shot fired on duty. According to CBS coverage cited in the record, he pleaded no contest and received community service.

The accounting

The ledger in Faulkner County reads: fired within days, charged, a no-contest plea, community service. Every institution that could act, acted — the sheriff who employed him, the prosecutor who charged him, the court that sentenced him.

It is worth being precise about the scale of that response, because this is what it looks like when the system actually moves. For shooting a nine-pound dog in the head — a shooting his own sheriff said came after numerous missed chances to de-escalate, a shooting whose central claim, the lunge, the caretaker disputed — Keenan Wallace lost his job and performed community service on a misdemeanor plea. That was the full extent of it.

Reese's survived the bullet. Wallace's career with the Faulkner County Sheriff's Office did not survive the week. And the finding his own sheriff left in the record stands as the plainest summary of what happened in Shiloh Estates: chance after chance to avoid firing, none of them taken.