Nobody Should Have to Be Told: Jax, Richland Township, and the Law on Shooting Dogs

A 2-year-old German Shepherd chased a deer into the woods and came home with two bullets in his neck. Michigan law already says no private person had the right to fire them. A month later, nobody has been charged.

Jax

I am a mom, a dog mom, and a cat mom, and I found out what happened to Jax today. Jax was two. His family had celebrated his birthday a few months earlier. He did what German Shepherds do when a deer crosses their path: he ran. My own dogs press against the fence every time the deer cut through my backyard, which is most mornings from spring to fall.

I heard shots that Sunday morning. I did not know what they were until today. When Jamie Price shared the location history from Jax’s GPS collar, the spot it logged at 8:59 a.m. was the house next door to mine. Children live on this street. Mine do.

The man who lives in that house retired from law enforcement on the east side of the state. He knows what Michigan law says about dogs and wildlife better than almost anyone on this street. My neighbors and I have dealt with him over dogs before. The complaints from that house have covered nearly everything, from my lights being on to my dogs barking inside my own home. He banged on my door and screamed about my dogs barking while they were playing in my fenced yard. He went to another neighbor’s house and screamed at her about her dog barking. She also told me he kicked her dog. When my beagles got out once and wandered into his yard, he confronted my family: “you need to keep your dogs out of my yard!”

Asking people to keep their dogs off your property is a reasonable boundary. Pounding on a neighbor’s door and kicking a dog are something else. I filed a police report today, and I am encouraging every neighbor who has had a run-in with him to do the same. No one has been arrested or charged. I am leaving his name to the Sheriff’s Office and the prosecutor. When they use it, so will I.

Here is what keeps hitting me. Nobody should have to be told not to shoot a neighbor’s dog, least of all someone who carried a badge. But in case anyone needed telling, Michigan already did it, in plain language, more than a hundred years ago.

What Happened on October 4

Jax was playing in his family’s backyard, which backs onto the Gull Prairie Nature Preserve, when he saw a deer and took off after it. Jamie Price told WWMT he came back about half an hour later, bleeding from the mouth and legs. She took him to an emergency veterinarian. X-rays showed two bullets in the back of his neck. The family made the decision to have him euthanized. Price told WWMT, “my kids didn’t get to say goodbye to him.”

Price had never heard gunshots in her neighborhood before. She posted what happened on Facebook. A neighbor, Mike Westra, had been photographing his new puppy in his backyard that morning and heard the shots. His Ring camera recorded them, and on the video the puppy turns toward the sound. “I didn’t know if it was just somebody off in the distance shooting or something in the neighborhood happened,” Westra told WWMT. When he saw Price’s post, he sent the clip to Price and to the Sheriff’s Office.

Jax was also wearing a GPS collar. The location history Price posted publicly logs him on Macywood Lane at 8:59 a.m. Deputies combined the collar data with the Ring video and placed the shooting in the woods near Macywood Lane, about two miles from Price’s house.

What Michigan Law Already Says

The most common justification for shooting a loose dog in rural Michigan is that it was chasing deer. The law answers that directly, and the answer is no, not for a private citizen.

Michigan’s Dog Law of 1919 covers dogs and wildlife in one sentence. Under MCL 287.278, a law enforcement officer may kill a dog determined to be molesting wildlife. The statute names officers. It does not extend that authority to homeowners, hunters, or neighbors.

The next section, MCL 287.279, lists the only situations in which any person may kill a dog: when the dog is in the act of pursuing, worrying, or wounding livestock or poultry, or attacking a person. Deer are not livestock. A dog running through the woods after one is not attacking anybody. The same section goes further. Outside those exceptions, only a law enforcement officer may kill or injure a dog wearing a current license tag, or even try to.

Then there is the criminal code. MCL 750.50b makes it a felony to kill, torture, mutilate, maim, or disfigure an animal without just cause. An intentional killing is second-degree animal cruelty, punishable by up to 7 years, a fine of up to $5,000, community service, or a combination, and a court can bar the person from owning animals. That is the statute behind Getting’s public call for accountability and consequences. As he told WWMT, “We’re not talking about a wild animal here.” The law exempts lawful hunting. A family’s German Shepherd is not game, and there is no season on pets.

Two more statutes apply to the gun itself. Michigan’s reckless discharge law, MCL 752.861, makes it a misdemeanor to fire a gun willfully and wantonly, without regard for the safety of others. And state hunting law, MCL 324.40111, bars anyone from hunting with a firearm within 150 yards of an occupied home, building, or farm structure without the written permission of the owner or occupant.

Does Richland Township Have a Rule on Firing Guns Near Homes?

No, and under current state law it cannot write one on its own.

Michigan’s firearms preemption law, MCL 123.1102, bars local governments from regulating firearms except where the Legislature allows it. MCL 123.1104 allows a city or a charter township to prohibit the discharge of a firearm within its jurisdiction. Richland Township is neither. It is a general law township, so it has no independent power to ban gunfire near homes.

The township’s own code reflects that. Richland Township’s Anti-Noise and Public Nuisance Ordinance, No. 161, exempts noise from firing guns as long as the discharge was authorized under Michigan law and local ordinances. In other words, the township defers to the state.

The state has one tool here, and it runs through the township board. Under MCL 324.41901, when the governing body of a political subdivision decides that hunters or firearm discharge are endangering people or property, it may pass a resolution asking the Department of Natural Resources to recommend closing an area to hunting and firearm discharge. The DNR then investigates, holds a public hearing in the community, and decides. Those decisions become Local Hunting and Firearms Controls, published in the Michigan Administrative Code.

Kalamazoo County already has two. Part of Oshtemo Township is closed to hunting and firearm discharge except at approved ranges, and firearms are barred within 150 yards of Sherman Lake in Ross Township. The DNR’s published list for Kalamazoo County contains no entry for Richland Township or the Village of Richland.

A resolution does not guarantee a result. In 2013, the DNR denied Bedford Township’s request for firearm controls after finding no demonstrated need. Bedford, also a general law township, had asked after a trustee received complaints about a neighbor’s repeated target practice. That is why the record matters. A board resolution backed by a sheriff’s report of a dog shot twice in the neck, a few hundred feet from homes and a nature preserve, is a different request than a noise complaint.

A Month Later

Within three days of the shooting, Price told WWMT there was a lead. Within five, the Kalamazoo County Prosecutor was on camera calling it a felony. The time and place were documented by people who had nothing to do with the investigation: a neighbor with a doorbell camera and a family that put a tracker on their dog.

As of publication, the public has not been told whether a warrant request has gone to the prosecutor’s office. Investigations take the time they take, and an animal cruelty case deserves the same care as any other felony. But the family has been waiting a month, and the neighborhood has been wondering, too. A public update from the Sheriff’s Office on where the case stands would cost nothing and would tell this community the case matters.

I will say what a lot of people on this street are thinking. If this were an inner-city neighborhood, with a time-stamped recording, GPS data, and a prosecutor already calling it a felony on camera, someone would have been arrested by now. Who gets the benefit of the doubt, and for how long, is a question about the system. So is the answer.

When the Shooter Carries, or Carried, a Badge

Police shootings of dogs are common enough that the federal government has a name for the problem. A program specialist with the U.S. Department of Justice’s Community Oriented Policing Services office has estimated that law enforcement officers kill 25 to 30 pet dogs a day nationwide. That figure is an estimate, because most departments do not track animal shootings at all. The COPS office publishes free training on dog encounters for that reason.

Michigan has its own record. Criminal Legal News, reviewing Detroit police records, reported that Detroit officers killed at least 25 dogs in 2015 and 21 more in the first half of 2016, and that two detectives had killed at least 100 dogs between them over their careers.

The federal appeals court over Michigan has set a low bar for those shootings. In Brown v. Battle Creek Police Department (2016), the Sixth Circuit, which covers Michigan, held for the first time that killing a family dog is a seizure under the Fourth Amendment. In the same opinion, it ruled that Battle Creek officers acted reasonably when they shot two dogs during a 2013 drug raid, including one that had retreated into the basement. The trial court had observed that there was not much policy anywhere on how officers should handle dogs.

Michigan lawmakers tried to change that. House Bill 5776, introduced in 2014, would have required police training in reading dog behavior and using nonlethal options. It was referred to the House Criminal Justice Committee and did not become law. Texas and Colorado now require canine encounter training for officers. In Michigan, Michigan Humane offers MCOLES-approved training to departments that choose it.

Retired and off-duty officers are a separate problem, and the cases keep coming. In August 2026, a retired NYPD officer in Yorktown Heights, New York, was charged with first-degree reckless endangerment and aggravated cruelty to animals after police said he shot and killed a homeless man’s shepherd-husky mix named Luke. In Missouri, a retired St. Louis County police officer admitted to shooting a neighbor’s dog, Ruger, after first denying it; a neighbor’s baby monitor had recorded the gunshot and the dog’s yelp. He was charged with a misdemeanor. A St. Charles County, Missouri, deputy resigned and was charged after police said he killed his neighbor’s dog with a pellet gun. In Georgia, an Americus K-9 officer was charged with aggravated cruelty after investigators said he went home, came back with a rifle, and shot a neighbor’s dog in the street.

Under Michigan’s Dog Law, retirement matters. MCL 287.278 gives the power to kill a dog molesting wildlife to a law enforcement officer. A retired officer is a private citizen, with no more right to shoot a neighbor’s dog than anyone else on the street. What the badge leaves behind is the training: how a gun is supposed to be handled around homes, what the statutes say, and what a felony looks like.

Why This Matters Beyond Jax

Loose dogs and deer are a fact of life in Kalamazoo County’s townships. So are guns, and most people who own them are careful. The law already sorts out who handles a dog that is bothering wildlife: an officer. That rule protects the deer, the dog, and every person within range of a bullet that misses.

When someone decides that rule does not apply to them, the cost does not stop with the animal. A rifle round fired in the woods behind homes does not know where the property lines are. Neighbors who heard those shots did not know what was being fired at. Neither did the parents with kids in their backyards that Sunday morning.

Animal cruelty cases are also a measure of how seriously a system takes the people in it. A felony that comes with a time-stamped recording, GPS data, and a public statement from the prosecutor is about as well documented as a case gets at the start. If it still stalls, that tells neighbors something about what they can expect when the next shot is fired.

I keep coming back to the simplest version of this. Jax chased a deer, the way dogs have chased deer forever. He deserved to come home. His family deserved to grow old with him. His kids deserved a goodbye. Nobody should have needed a statute to know that, and the statute is there anyway. Now it needs to be enforced.

Jax was the one who was hit that morning. He was not the only one in range. There are children on this street and in the yards along that preserve, and two rounds went into those woods on a Sunday morning. That is unacceptable, and it should not take a second shooting for anyone to treat it that way.