Hunting a Reported Coyote, He Shot Odin the Husky. Then He Found the Collar.

Odin was eleven months old — a Siberian Husky, somebody's not-quite-grown dog, wearing a collar. On November 19, 2024, in Northbridge, Massachusetts, that collar was discovered too late to matter.

The town's animal control officer was out that day responding to multiple reports of coyote sightings. By his account, an animal came toward him with its head down and its hackles up, closing to within about ten yards. Taking it for a coyote, he fired.

Then he approached the body — and found the collar. The animal he had killed was Odin.

Every detail of Odin's last moments — the lowered head, the raised hackles, the ten yards — comes from the officer who shot him. There is no competing narrative to weigh, because the officer himself discovered the mistake: a pet husky, not yet a year old, shot dead by the one municipal employee whose specific job is handling animals — the specialist a town relies on to know what he is looking at before he fires.

The department's response is a matter of record, and it is brief. The police chief said the officer was distraught. The department offered to pay Odin's cremation costs. No discipline was reported.

That is the entire institutional answer: sympathy, and a cremation bill.

Whether anything changed in Northbridge afterward — the protocols for identifying an animal before firing at it, the training given to the officer, the rules for responding to coyote reports — appears nowhere in the public record. Nothing compelled the department to answer those questions, because no national requirement obliges any police department to account publicly for shooting a dog, mistaken or otherwise. An eleven-month-old husky could be killed ten yards from the person shooting at him, by the town's own animal specialist, and the only obligations the moment generated were the ones the department chose to volunteer: a chief's description of his officer's distress, and an offer to cover the cost of cremating the body.

An officer's distress is not discipline. A cremation payment is not accountability. Odin's family received both, and nothing else. No discipline was reported.