The shooting in Missouri led to the mayor’s resignation and calls to disband law enforcement agency

Police bodycam footage showed an Missouri police officer chasing Teddy around a large field and making several unsuccessful attempts to catch him before shooting the dog dead. Photo / change.org

A city in Missouri has agreed to pay a dog owner US$500,000 ($884,700) after a police officer fatally shot the man’s 6kg blind, deaf, pet - an shooting that led to a mayor’s resignation and calls to disband the local law enforcement agency.

Officials in Sturgeon, Missouri, and one of the city’s police officers agreed to the payout to Nicholas Hunter, who had owned Teddy - a 5-year-old shih tzu - since the dog was 12 weeks old.

Hunter sued the city in May last year after police officer Myron Woodson shot Teddy twice at close range while responding to a call from a neighbour reporting a lost dog.

Hunter’s lawyers at the Crinnian Law Firm announced the settlement at the weekend, saying that they hoped other police departments “will learn from this and train their officers better in the future so events like this don’t happen again”.

“Mr Hunter is relieved this matter is concluded but nothing can ever bring his Teddy back,” the lawyers added in a statement distributed by the Animal Legal Defence Fund, which supported Hunter’s lawsuit. “Teddy was a good dog who did not deserve this.”

The Sturgeon mayor’s office did not respond to a request for comment. Woodson, who has left the department, could not be reached for comment.

The shooting shocked and outraged residents of Sturgeon, a town of about 1150 people 32km north of Columbia, where animal control duties were handled by the local police.

There were calls to disband the city’s two-officer law enforcement agency after Teddy’s death.

Teddy escaped from his fenced-in kennel while Hunter was at dinner and wandered into a nearby yard. The neighbour called police, hoping to reunite Teddy with his owner.

Woodson responded and fruitlessly tried to secure Teddy with a “catch pole” for about five minutes before drawing his gun and firing twice on Teddy as the small dog was facing away, according to Hunter’s lawsuit and body-camera video.

The city posted on its Facebook page that the officer shot the dog out of concern that it had rabies.

A separate post later added that officials had reviewed the body-camera video and found the officer’s actions justified.

Kevin Abrahamson, Sturgeon’s Mayor at the time, initially defended the shooting before abruptly resigning. The new mayor suspended Woodson, who eventually left the department, according to ABC17.

“The city didn’t handle it well,” Seth Truesdell, who replaced Abrahamson as Mayor, told local news station KMIZ. Truesdell said the city was “inundated with over 700 calls a day from all over the world” after the shooting.

Chris Green, the Animal Legal Defence Fund’s executive director, said pet dogs are killed by police more often than people realise.

He also said it was clear from the officer’s body-cam footage that Teddy was “not a threat”.

“Anyone who sees that footage of Teddy - he’s a tiny little dog, he’s not advancing towards the officer,” Green said.

The group is hoping the settlement leads Missouri to pass legislation mandating training for law enforcement officers encountering people’s pets. Not having such training puts people and animals at risk, Green said.

“And it ends up costing a bunch of money, which is unnecessary,” he said.

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