Pet Protective Services: An Ambitious Proposal for American School Safety

Layne Wappierrre

Issue 40 * Spring 2018

The problem with previous attempts at school safety has always been their lack of ambition.

Within the American context, ambitious projects like the space race and the progress west have always produced better real-world results than less ambitious measures. The spirit of American entrepreneurship, the spirit of American enterprise, the spirits of "disruption" and innovation have always succeeded where going-along-to-get-along has failed.

Locking down schools in the face of an armed madman, for example, is impractical, expensive, and derivative. Metal detectors have been tried, and some are already in place. But they must be monitored, costing staff time and money, and making the multiple entrances and exits required by students and staff difficult, preventing work study programs, for instance.

Metal detectors and security checkpoints also send the wrong message, making bright, clean,law-abiding students and their bright, clean, law-abiding parents feel like criminals. These measures also create few deterrents to the criminally insane, who will merely target the security checkpoints themselves or find other "soft" targets at the school.

Likewise, while it is necessary to treat the insane with strong measures whenever possible and to cut off all of their freedoms and possible means for opportunity, for their own good and in the name of safety and treatment, these measures are inadequate to create truly safe schools. The insane, after all, are unconcerned whether or not they live or die and, like terrorists, are unlikely to be deterred by the threat of armed protection.

Curtailment of Second Amendment rights is, of course, a non-starter. It would not only send us on a disastrous slippery slope into inevitable tyranny; it would prevent bright, clean, law-abiding people from protecting themselves. Eroding this most basic of rights would make freedom itself impossible, as a free people must always have access to firearms in order to counter any threat to freedom and to impress upon the unfree the power of the free through imminent threat of bodily harm.

Critics of unfettered freedom, however, do have an important point, no matter how despicable they may otherwise be: when you are in school and learning, it is best to keep your attention on your studies and not on the constant possibility of being shot in a mad rampage. Hyper-vigilance, while necessary in the name of protecting freedom, is, indeed, a lot of work. We do not, in fact, create schools as places for hyper-vigilance, but as places of hyper-diligence, places where we learn to work hard on the basics of proper behavior and the practice of extreme discipline.

The advent of service animals, while basically a good thing, has come to pervade day-to-day life. From emotional support peacocks on the nation's airlines to emotional support pigs at the local coffee shop, these animals have begun to weave themselves right into our culture. We have all learned not to pet seeing eye dogs and have learned to tolerate teacup poodles popping up out of handbags in the most unlikely of places. At the other end of the spectrum, otherwise rational human beings refer to their pets as children and spend lavishly on their food, toys, and training. Cats have become virtual—and sometimes actual—celebrities without even demonstrating any particular talent, and entire websites are devoted to the apparent facial expression of dogs.

It is, then, about time the rest of society began to actually benefit from this contemporary pervasiveness of pets and service animals.

Therefore, this author proposes the following: in order to create safer schools, it is our most solemn opportunity—nay our sacred duty—to arm housepets and let them loose in every K-12 environment and, most probably, our regents institutions as well.

The only solution to a bad guy with a gun is a peeved tabby with a gun.

A golden retriever has both the time and the temperament to protect our children, and he has no need to pull a salary beyond Milkbones or a pension beyond a pet bed in a back room. Furthermore, the presence of pets in the classroom would provide the aforementioned emotional support our children deserve and have come to expect as they deal with the stress of assignments and exams.

Skeptics might argue that there would still be training costs for the animals themselves, and this I freely admit. However, animal trainers do cost less than trainers and teachers for human beings. Training cycles tend to be shorter for animals than for people, and expensive certifications are not required for non-human employees, neither are stepped promotion schemes or high-dollar degrees.

This plan steps outside the normal bounds of consideration. In this sense, it falls within the traditions of American enterprise: far-reaching and ambitious rather than timid and meek. Its benefits are many, and its costs are few, and this author sees no reason to delay its immediate implementation.