In the third season of the BBC crime drama Peaky Blinders, there’s a crude joke that’s taken on new relevance this week. “What animal has got a prick halfway up its back?” asks John Shelby, one of the show’s gangster protagonists. “A cavalry horse!,” comes the punchline. The jab at the officers of the British Empire made sense in the 1920s, when the show is set—and it makes even more sense in 2025, when American cops have reminded everyone how they force animals to brutalize humans. 

Across the United States, the cavalry has been called out. In California, Texas, and several other states, thousands of people have been rising up in protest against Donald Trump, Stephen Miller, and the masked ICE agents who’ve been tearing neighborhoods apart with their deportation raids. In response, Trump has tried to crush the protests with military force. He’s targeting Los Angeles in particular, where he’s sent in 4,000 troops from the National Guard and 700 Marines. Governor Gavin Newsom calls the move “authoritarianism,” and it is. But Newsom is just as guilty, bragging about working with ICE “over 10,500 times since I became governor” and promising to “deal with civil unrest” himself using the LAPD. He agrees with Trump that the protests should be put down; he just wants to be the one in charge of the repression. Under Newsom’s watch, the LAPD have been beating people with batons, choking them with tear gas and pepper spray, and even shooting journalists with so-called “less lethal” rubber bullets. (Really, these can be very lethal if they hit a vulnerable spot, and can easily blind their targets). In a lot of cases, the cops dealing out this violence are mounted on horseback. And this past Sunday, an LAPD riot cop trampled over a protester, putting their life at risk. 

The footage of the attack has gone viral online, and it’s easy to see why, because it’s terrifying—both for the protester and for the horse. In the video, the person is knocked down and lying in the street. They’re alone and empty-handed, wearing shorts and a T-shirt, and they’re surrounded by cops in riot gear. At least five of the cops are on horses, and one of them runs directly over the fallen protester. Then another mounted cop strikes the person with a large stick from behind as they’re trying to recover their bearings and stand up. Then another cop on foot throws them to the ground again. It’s the kind of clip that, if it came from any other nation, would be described with terms like “shock troops” and “crackdown by the regime.”

As several commentators have pointed out, it doesn’t look like the horse wanted to do it. In the footage, you can see that it tries its best to step over the person, not on them. And this makes sense, because horses are naturally shy, skittish animals. Their typical instinct is to flee, not attack. What’s more, their limbs are notoriously fragile, and stomping on a full-grown human could easily cause them to fall over or break a leg. The animal was probably terrified. But for the defenseless person on the ground, it’s even worse, because police horses weigh anywhere from 1,200 to 1,900 pounds (not including the rider). That kind of weight, if it comes thumping down on your head or chest, could easily kill someone, especially if the horse is wearing metal shoes. The Los Angeles incident is a perfect example of why cops should not be allowed to use animals as weapons in the first place. 

Cops, and the people who work with them, make no secret of the way they use animals to dominate and control people. On the website for Haven Gear, a company that sells riot shields, armor, and other police equipment, horses are compared to military hardware: “Militaries have used cavalry units for thousands of years, and police-mounted units stem from that tradition.” The company goes on to tout the “more intimidating presence” a cop on horseback has, boasting that “in crowded events, that large, intimidating body of an animal works to dissuade malcontents.” True enough. The threat of being crushed under a powerful set of hooves would tend to “dissuade” anyone, just as any violent threat would. Notably, police departments themselves describe one of the primary purposes of police horses as “crowd management” or “crowd control”—a euphemism for the suppression of protests, labor strikes, and other mass movements of people that governments don’t want to occur. 

This latest trampling in Los Angeles is not unique. In Houston, a mounted cop ran over a woman named Melissa Gomez during a Black Lives Matter protest in 2020, leading her to sue for “severe pain” and “personal injuries.” In Columbus, Ohio, a community organizer named Tammy Fournier Alsaada was “knocked down [and] hit by a police horse” during a demonstration for George Floyd the same year. During the Canadian truckers’ protests in 2022, police in Ottawa used their horses to knock over and trample people, too—which, despite the underlying stupidity of protesting against COVID safety restrictions, they didn’t deserve. And the harm goes the other way, to the animals themselves. Just in the last few years, police horses have died because they were scared by a drone and ran into a post, or collapsed in the heat while patrolling a carnival, or because the cops got “distracted by paperwork” and neglected to feed or water them. That isn’t good for anyone, human or animal.

Being involved with the police isn’t good for dogs, either, because they’re getting weaponized in the same way. By one estimate, there are around 50,000 active police dogs in the United States, ranging from specialized drug-sniffing dogs to the ones in all-purpose “K-9” units. Even the training for these dogs is cruel, with “prong collars, choke chains, and forced submission accomplished by seizing dogs’ testicles” in routine use, and the dogs themselves are “bred for aggressiveness” over generations. According to the American Kennel Club, the “most popular discipline of the police dog is suspect apprehension,” which is inherently violent: “Police dogs are trained to bite dangerous suspects and hold them hostage.” As a consequence, a lot of police dogs die and get injured every year. They’re shot, they’re stabbed, and they’re strangled, all because the police have deliberately put them in dangerous situations rather than face the risk themselves. (And that’s when the cops don’t accidentally shoot their own dogs or kill them by leaving them in hot cars.)

In many cases, though, it isn’t really “dangerous suspects” the dogs are unleashed on. Like with the horses, it’s protesters, racial minorities, and anyone else the police are hostile to. During the Civil Rights era, police dogs were routinely used to attack Black people, including children, during rallies and marches. The practice dates all the way back to slavery, when bloodhounds and other dogs were used to track and recapture enslaved people who tried to escape, and it has persisted through the decades. In his song “Reagan,” Atlanta rapper Killer Mike recalls how the police used dogs to rampage through his neighborhood in the 1980s: 

They declared a war on drugs, like a war on terror

But what it really did was let the police terrorize whoever

But mostly Black boys, but they would call us “niggas”

And lay us on our belly, while they fingers on they triggers

They boots was on our head, they dogs was on our crotches

And they would beat us up if we had diamonds on our watches

This isn’t just a dramatic line in a rap song, and it didn’t end in the Reagan years. In 2019, the Journal of Forensic and Legal Medicine published an analysis of 32,951 individual dog bites by K-9 units, which accounted for 1.1 percent of all dog bites in American emergency rooms for the years 2005-2013. They found that 42 percent of the people bitten had been Black, a wildly disproportionate result since only around 14 percent of the U.S. population is. The data also suggests that the majority of people bitten by police dogs are not threats at all. According to statistics released by the Houston Police Department, the cops in that city attacked 104 people with dogs in a time period from March 2022 to May 2023—and from that number, 77 were ultimately “either charged with nonviolent offenses or nothing at all.” Some of them were likely victims of what police departments call “pain compliance”—the use of a dog bite to make someone stop moving and obey. (The more truthful word is “torture.”) In Indianapolis, the Marshall Project found that someone was bitten by a police dog every five days, that 60 percent of those people were “suspected in only low-level and non-violent crimes or traffic infractions,” and that “more than half” were Black. It’s a consistent pattern of pointless, sadistic, and racist violence, harming humans and animals alike. 

The really perverse aspect of all this, too, is that police use their animals as propaganda weapons as well as literal ones. Along with “crowd management,” one of the primary reasons they list for having dogs and horses around is “community outreach” and even “K9 public relations.” Meeting a cute German Shepard or a beautiful horse “softens people and provides a connection between the police and public,” says one police captain. Never mind that the same animal will be used to corral and brutalize “the public” the moment anyone steps out of line. This form of “copaganda” even extends into the realm of kids’ cartoons, with the wildly popular Paw Patrol series revolving around a heroic police dog named Chase. The kids aren’t told who real police dogs chase, and what they do to them when they catch up. Through depictions of animals, they’re taught that the police are there to help and protect them, when that’s the exact opposite of how it really works.

The cops should not be allowed to do these things. They should not be able to ride horses into protests, beating people with sticks from the saddle and running people over. They should not be able to breed and train dogs specifically to bite people, especially when it turns out that most of the people being bitten pose no threat. And to their credit, some of the major animal rights organizations in this country are starting to realize it. People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) has called for an end to the use of K-9 units, citing a graphic 2024 incident where a cop punched his own dog in the face and tried to defend it as acceptable “correction.” They also point out that, with more and more technology at their disposal, cops don’t truly need dogs. The Australian division of PETA has also urged police in Melbourne to stop using horses after several of the animals were “punched and struck by projectiles” during a protest. That position—police abolition for the animal world, essentially—is a sensible one, and it’s in keeping with the overall principle that animals are not things for humans to use and throw away. 

Meanwhile, the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (ASPCA) hasn’t quite gotten there yet. Their policy page still says the organization “supports the use of horses and dogs in law enforcement [and] homeland security,” as long as the animals are “humanely raised, trained and afforded every consideration for their safety and well-being, including the use of bullet-resistant vests.” That’s a softer and more compromised stance, in need of some work. Really, there is no reason we have to allow the police to keep deploying dogs to bite us and horses to run us down in the street, and for those animals to get hurt doing it. In the ongoing effort to cut down gargantuan police budgets and distribute the money to social services instead, things like K-9 units and mounted “crowd control” are an obvious target. 

A popular slogan holds that there are “no bad dogs, only bad owners.” In other words, if a domesticated animal is acting in some harmful way, it’s probably the fault of a human who has trained it badly, abused it, or neglected it. If that’s the case, the police are some of the worst owners around. The whole point of a police force owning animals is to harass, control, intimidate, and harm people, and to deceive them into thinking the police are friendlier than they really are. 

It would be easy to say that the slogan ACAB (All Cops are Bastards) includes police horses. But that’s the wrong conclusion, because it’s not the horses’ fault, or the dogs’ either. They’re being forced into situations and behaviors that aren’t natural for them, and in the process they’re being harmed too. It’s the police themselves who are the problem.