Yeah, no kidding. This is one of those screwed up situations where you can point fingers in a dozen different directions, yet possibly not hit the responsible party (pun not intended). I can certainly feel for the owner - if one of our dogs or my wife's cat were badly injured by a car, we'd be beside ourselves. (We do have the luxury of the animal clinic only being five minutes up the road with 24 hour on-call, and have used it for a terminally ill pet in the middle of the night.) But, I also have to feel a little for the cop in this instance. He's subject to the laws and ordinances covering governing animal complaint calls; is it within his legal authority to euthanize an injured domestic animal, and does it spell out how and under what circumstances, or is that subject to his (or her) discretion? And is Harrisonburg municipal Animal Control supposed to get involved at some point? The one thing I can tell you is that there would be hell to pay if he discharged his weapon within city limits to put down a cat, no matter how humane or compassionate his intent was, which is why he didn't draw down on it to begin with. As it is, he'll probably have PETA and a gaggle of other animal rights groups crawling around in his shorts for dispatching it like a baby seal. Classic damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don't scenario. Nobody wins, including poor ol' Fluffy. The one thing we can take away from this is, we've regulated and legislated common sense right out of our society, and this is another of myriad examples how.
--H.L. Mencken, The Baltimore Evening Sun, July 26, 1920