A Loose Pit Bull Killed a Rabbit and Bit an Officer. The Officer Shot It.

By the time a Fort Lauderdale police officer reached the house, around 7:40 on the morning of January 13, 2026, the attack was already underway. A loose American pit bull terrier had entered the property, killed the family's pet rabbit, and tried to attack the homeowner, according to police.

Then, police said, the dog turned on the officer as well, biting the officer's forearm. The officer shot it.

The dog survived the gunshot. Animal Control sedated it, and there its story ended anyway: the dog's owner — who is not named in the reporting — asked that it be euthanized, and it was.

This is one of the rare entries in this database where the reporting records no dispute at all. There is no competing account from a witness, no owner insisting the animal was gentle, no video described as contradicting the official version. The record, as it exists, is the police account: a rabbit killed on its own family's property, a homeowner menaced, an officer bitten and treated at a hospital, and a single decision made in response.

The costs still ran in every direction. A family lost a pet. The officer was treated at a hospital for what police described as a minor injury. And the dog, wounded rather than killed at the scene, was put down not by a court order or a dangerous-dog ruling but at the request of the owner whose dog had been running loose in the first place.

What the reporting does not say is worth noting too. It does not name the owner. It does not say how the dog came to be loose, whether it had any history of aggression, or whether its owner faced any citation or charge over an escape that ended with an officer in the hospital and the dog dead.

The Fort Lauderdale Police Department's Animal Crimes Unit opened an investigation. No discipline against the officer was reported — and in this case, nothing in the record suggests any was sought; by every account available, the officer fired after being bitten. What the Animal Crimes Unit concluded, and what consequences the dog's owner did or did not face, the record does not say.