poor we fella.... I wonder if he got a sniff of somthing mind altering......   

It's a sad outcome but it's worth remembering an important distinction - this was a working dog, not a family pet. The safety of people at the airport comes before that of an animal. This is nothing to do with the airport making money.

[A] top vet told the Herald that getting a dart gun would have been "implausible".

 

Callum Irvine, ‎head of veterinary services at the New Zealand Veterinary Association, said it was rare for vet clinics to have access to a tranquiliser.

 

"Dart guns in themselves are very rarely used these days," he said.

 

"The only place you might find a dart gun would be in a zoo."

 

Tranquilisers were only accurate at close range, he said.

 

"It isn't necessarily very easy to sedate an animal that's on the run and in distress like that. In that situation you can actually make the problem worse because the animal becomes partially sedated. It isn't always the perfect solution it might appear to be."

 

However Irvine "absolutely" understood why people were upset.

 

"It's a terrible situation," he said.

 

"But I'm sure the decision wasn't made lightly and fundamentally when it comes to these types of decisions, the most important thing is to protect human wellbeing."

Geektastic:

 

bmt:

 

I haven't paid much attention to this story as its such a non issue for me, but its hard to avoid hearing all these armchair experts and people screeching the dog should have been tranquillised etc. What makes 99.9% of these people remotely qualified to make any sort of judgement on the situation other than "omg don't shoot dogs!".

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Same thing that makes most people qualified to comment on 99.99999999% of what happens ion the world, about which they know little or anything.

 

Doesn't mean that they are not entitled to the view that the dog (which did nothing wrong and which escaped almost certainly due to human error since most dogs cannot open locked doors) has more right to life than the airport has to make money, for example.

 

Given the number of animals working at the airport as well as the number of animals travelling through the airport, I'm surprised that (actually that's a lie - I am not surprised, sadly) no one had properly planned for the eventuality with adequate trained staff, possible non-lethal alternatives available on site and so on.

 

Yes everyone can have their opinion, but like this story has shown, often those opinions are based on having no prior knowledge of anything to do with the story and having only read a headline at worst. So when you have DogLover2017 who has absolutely no idea about tranquillisers, guns, airport SOPs, what actually happened on the day, etc etc, tweeting that it's an outrage and they didn't need to kill the dog.. why the hell do we care? News stories and opinions are formed based on rubbish like this, and sadly its often reporters who are ticking all of those boxes despite it being journalism 101.

You think you could catch a dog that doesn't want to be caught, in the dark, running around an airport with safety hazards?

Or are you saying they should have shot it after the first half hour?

mattwnz: According to the media it cost over 100 k to train the dog, so that is a lot of wasted money. I don't know enough about what happened, I suspect not many do, but this was a domesticated dog, not a wild bear or lion. I can't see how it could have taken 3 hours to try and catch it. At least there is now an investigation.

Unless the airport was in lockdown, I bet the planes and cargo and everything are still moving about. That means whatever vehicle moving around has to obey driving in airport rules. Which are not like your downtown Queen Street style driving. Far from it.

It took 3 hrs let me guess why. They probably don't have a robust sniffer dog escape policy ... ! (I know I said I thought they did but now I don't think they did) there will be a generic animal on runway policy but probably not a sniffer dog escape policy.

Probably do in a few weeks :)

mattwnz: I can't see how it could have taken 3 hours to try and catch it. At least there is now an investigation.