1. Lassie, Play Dead! Excessive Use of Force on Pets
Huven, E. Research Proposal
March 4th, 2015

2. Research Question Is excessive use of force being used against pets?
Numerous news reports just within a cursory past two year period.
Rise of social media seems to have brought this issue to a higher national level of awareness
What are the broad ranging implications of this?
Hypothesis: That law enforcement officers are utilizing excessive use of force against pets in the pursuit of their duties.
Null Hypothesis: That they are not using excessive force against pets.
Why the Research Matters
Illustrates an endemic attitude in law enforcement.
Has broader reaching implications outside of pets that strengthen arguments against excessive use of force on people.
It has never been studied before

3. Literature Review What we know What is not known
That there have been numerous occurrences across the United States. Oldest news report seen was from the 1980’s, while the majority have occurred in the 2000’s and ’s.
It seems that the nature of social media and its rise has allowed this issue to become more widely known.
The nature of excessive use of force against people seems to be amplified when it comes to pets.
There have been successful ruling by courts against officers who kill pets for “property destruction”.
Animal Legal Defense Fund listed reasons as to why officers shoot pets, based off of the complaints they have received by pet owners.
What is not known
Almost everything, little to no research has been done on this subject.
Currently, all we know is from local news reports and social media outrage.

4. Methodological Plan Exploratory Research Quantitative Content Analysis
Research will allow us to answer if this is a systemic issue, but not why.
Although, assumptions will be drawn to give future researchers a foundation to build on.
Quantitative Content Analysis
Utilizing Google News and the Google Alerts feature, a 3 year news article study will be conducted.
Using an extensive list of search terms, Google Alerts will compile a list of relevant news articles daily that match these terms.
“Police shoot dog”, “Officer kills pet”, “Law enforcement kills pet”
The coders will scour these articles for relevant demographical and situational information for input into a database for analysis.
Additional information may need to be retrieved from contacting the parties involved and or reviewing police reports.

5. Limitations Logistical Issues
Lack of information: There may be information missing from the news reports, specifically demographical info on the officers, owners, and pet.
Ethics: Names and other relevant identifying information will be collected as a part of the study, but will not be featured in the final report. If specific occurrences need to be mentioned, names will be replaced by an identifying code, with location being restricted to state and time being a range of 5 years.

6. Limitations cont. Design limitations:
Selection Bias: We are only gathering information on cases that reach newsworthy reporting. There are numerous cases that might go unnoticed.
Generalizability: Since we are pulling reports daily from a service that crawls all online reports in the US, we should be able to gain a generalizability that relates to the majority US. However, this will depend on the number of cases we receive in that time period.