He's Man's Best Friend, Unless...

It's been an age old practice for man to employ the use of dogs as co-workers for certain tasks. Military and law enforcement agencies rely on K-9 units for special needs on a daily basis, to protect and serve. Why, suddenly, are there limits for that?

Over nearly two decades of combined military and emergency services, I've come in contact with a number of working dogs and their handlers, and always have found myself walking away highly impressed. It isn't every dog that can make it into the training program to be a working dog for either the military or emergency services. The dogs are always very well cared for, well behaved, and highly intelligent animals. And I have never seen, among this group, a dirty working dog, unless they had come in from sort of field operation.

Yet and still, according to Gar Swafford's article, Muslims Hate Dogs?, Muslims consider these animals as "spiritually unclean." Does this mean that they believe horses and camels are more spiritually clean than dogs? It's an interesting situation, but it's creating certain problems for K-9 units in the British law enforcement community.

POLICE sniffer dogs trained to spot terrorists at railway stations may no longer come into contact with Muslim passengers – after complaints that it is against the suspects’ religion.

A report for the Transport Department has raised the prospect that the animals should only touch passengers’ luggage because it is considered “more acceptable”.

In the Muslim faith, dogs are deemed to be spiritually “unclean”. But banning them from touching passengers would severely restrict their ability to do their job.

The report follows trials of station security measures in the wake of the 2005 London suicide bomb attacks. In one trial, some female Muslims said the use of a body scanner was also unacceptable because it was tantamount to being forced to strip.

If this is going to be the case, and law enforcement is going to have to start limiting their security methodology in order to be "politically correct" in dealing with the Muslim community, to what lengths will this ultimately go? If dogs can not be used to sniff bombs because they are "spiritually unclean," and scanning machines can't be used because it is the equivalent of "strip searching," what comes next? An insistence that any questioning of suspects be conducted only by a Muslim interrogator?

Law enforcement already has a hard enough job as it is today, given the number of laws limiting how they can conduct themselves when apprehending a suspect. Adding further limitations upon them, such as limiting the usage of dogs trained to sniff out explosive devices, only creates a situation in which terrorists have a ready made loophole built into the system for them to utilize to continue conducting a campaign of death and destruction.

Fortunately, British law enforcement officers are savvy enough to realize this, and have announced that they will continue to utilize the K-9 patrols, and that the handlers will be "culturally sensitive."

Once and Always, a Dog Loving American Fighting Man

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