Conferences & Trainings

Police Officer and Canine Encounters

Questions and Answers

Questions and Answers on Police Officers and Canine Encounters with instructor Kerri Burns

Kerri Burns has been in the Animal Welfare field for the past 7 years. She was also a police officer in Arizona for two years.

Q: How was the Bark...Stop, Drop, & Roll technique developed?

People who have worked in the animal welfare field for a long time understand what it means to say “no fight” to a dog. The way to say "no fight" to a potentially-dangerous dog is to not challenge him -- basically not staring at the dog, dropping your eyes. You also need to adjust your body posture to be less threatening so that you're not towering over him. When you do this in the field, you’ll see the animal responding differently because you’re communicating in a way that a dog understands.

When I was working with Dr. Emily Weiss, who is a behaviorist very familiar with this, we wanted a name for these steps that would help people learn them quickly and would be easy to remember in a high-stress situation that demands an immediate response. Bark...Stop, Drop, & Roll was what we decided to call the technique.

Q: How successful is it?

This system works about 90% of the time. Most dogs are very receptive -- it's very dramatic, actually. If you go out and practice the technique, you watch the demeanor of the animal change before your eyes.

Q: How helpful has this been? Any feedback from law enforcement?

It’s honestly been an eye-opener, even for us, how helpful it's been. Law enforcement are not really trained to communicate with animals; they’re trained to communicate with humans, and that communication style is completely different than how you communicate with dogs. So they're out in the field, having to make split-second decisions and they're not equipped with the skills to respond to a dog. The course on Police Officers and Canine Encounters gives them the know-how to make a better decision in how to respond when an animal is involved. Officers tell me, ‘I feel so much better. Now I understand. Now I won’t be as afraid.’ It boosts their confidence enormously to give them those skills, simple as they are.

Q: Do you think dogs are troublemakers, or do they just get a bad rap?

Honestly, I think dogs get a bad rap. Because dogs have been so domesticated over the centuries, a lot of it has to do with human education, and we control the behaviors of the dogs.

Q: Where do you teach the class?

The class is geared toward police officers… but really it’s something that we could take and use with postal workers, for FedEx, for UPS, any carriers like that, meter-readers, those types of things. Not only are people in those professions more likely to encounter dogs on the job, but dogs often show aggression in response to a person in uniform. With a little more work, the Bark...Stop, Drop, & Roll technique could even be used in the schools.

Dr. Weiss and I do whatever we can to educate as many people as possible. We travel around the country and speak at some of the national seminars on this topic, in addition to the requests we get through American Humane.

Q. Why do dogs tend to show aggression to people in uniform?

Partly because of the defensive posture that officers are trained to assume.