Kentucky cops are paying Christian ministries to train their dogs at Ark Encounter

There's evidence that taxpayer-funded training seminars for dogs, hosted at Ark Encounter, pushed Christianity on participants

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Why did the Kentucky State Police pay money to a Christian ministry in order to train its dogs at a conference full of religious sermons and Bible verses?

And why are both sides publicly bragging about it despite the obvious breach of church/state separation?

This has been brewing for a while but only recently have all the pieces come together. Last year, for example, Attorney General Russell Coleman posted about how his office’s dog “completed a training session at Ark Encounter with her colleagues from the Kentucky State Police and the Boone County Sheriff’s Office.” You can see the giant monstrosity of a “boat” behind the dogs in one of the pictures below.

It’s always possible that Ark Encounter, despite being a Christian ministry, was simply the host for a secular event. While that might still be problematic, like a church hosting a public school graduation ceremony because it’s the only space in town with enough seats, the post didn’t suggest that Christian preaching was part of the event.

But this past February, Answers in Genesis gave away the game when it posted about how it hosted its third annual “K9 Conference”:

A total of 47 K9 teams from across the United States, along with 2 international teams, participated in this four-day event. Throughout the conference, the K9s and their handlers engaged in over 30 scenarios set in various locations around the Ark Encounter property.

Again, was this a secular event at a Christian location, or an explicitly Christian event? Creationist Ken Ham is thankfully not smart enough to know you’re supposed to keep the latter under wraps, so he just blurted it out:

This conference continues to grow every year as the word gets out in the K9 handler community. Not only will this kind of training help save lives, but the officers who participated were able to hear the gospel and the message of the truth of God’s Word. Praise the Lord!

Ah. So it was a dog training event full of religious preaching. It’s fine for Ark Encounter to host an event like that. It’s not okay for government agencies to take part in it. Lucky for us, Ham included pictures in his post that showed the Kentucky State Police taking part in the event:

Another picture posted by Ham revealed the presence of TACTICA Ministries, one of the groups in charge of the training.

TACTICA stands for “Teaching Authorities, Christian Truth in Central America.” And when Roscommon County Undersheriff Ben Lowe spoke about the ministry during a sermon in February, he made clear the relationship between government agencies and his group:

[Shows picture]

… This was a K9 conference that [TACTICA Ministries] hold there [at Ark Encounter] every year. So they have K9 officers that come from around the country to train with their dogs at the Ark Encounter. The Ark Encounter hosts them, and they do the same thing with those officers that they do with their trainings overseas.

Those officers can earn things by memorizing verses. They're preaching the gospel to them. And so through doing some of these specialized trainings, they've come up with ways that they can continue to grow the ministry here in the United States.

When Ark Encounter watchdog Dan Phelps filed a public records request to learn more about the training conference, he got a sense of the costs involved:

The open records information showed that Kentucky taxpayers paid approximately $225 for the training of one officer. This doesn’t include money spent by other Kentucky law enforcement agencies. Kentucky law enforcement from Villa Hills Police Department and the Boone County Sheriff’s Office participated. Some out-of-state regional law enforcement that participated included the Genesee County Ohio, Twinsburg (Ohio) Police Department, and the Collier County (Florida) Sheriff’s Department.

…

According to the itinerary, a good deal of the first day of training (14:00 to 19:00) involved signing in and “roaming” the Ark. This visitation combined with the speakers' bios and other activities, such as lunchtime “testimonials” show that religious instruction and evangelism of law enforcement officers was a substantial portion of the K9 training.

Phelps also learned that the Welcome Package included a note from Answers In Genesis’ Department of Public Safety’s Sgt. Adam Witherspoon that was nothing more than an attempt to convert everyone to Christianity.

… Also, AIG Dept of Public Safety makes no effort to hide who we are. We care deeply about your working relationship with your dog and want to do everything we can to help you improve as a K9 team. More importantly though we care about you as an individual. God created all of us in His image. Due to our sin, and we are all sinners, Romans 3:23-24. 23.

...for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, 24. being justified as a gift by His grace through the redemption which is in Christ Jesus; we are condemned to spend eternity separated from God. Jesus Christ however took our punishment on the Cross. Our most sincere prayer is that if you don’t know Jesus Christ as your savior, come and talk to us. We would love to share with you the Good News of the Gospel, which grants us eternity with God in heaven.

The Freedom From Religion Foundation’s Samantha Lawrence soon sent a letter to the Commissioner of the Kentucky State Police essentially telling them to stop the bullshit.

Sending employees to train with a religious organization—and only a religious organization—is unconstitutional. We ask the Kentucky State Police to investigate and cease sending staff and resources to participate in a religious group’s event.

…

It is unconstitutional and unwarranted to send public employees to participate in religious exercises. We request that you take immediate action to end the Kentucky State Police's partnership with Answers in Genesis to protect the rights of employees and ensure that all future officer training is secular…

The bottom line is that taxpayer-funded cops shouldn’t be attending religious worship sessions under the guise of dog training. There’s no lack of secular K9 training options, which made this even more egregious. Tax dollars shouldn’t be spent promoting Christianity or Answers in Genesis. It’s not that complicated.

FFRF never got a response to that letter.

But this situation may finally be blowing up after the Louisville Courier Journal published an article detailing the relationship between the police agencies and the Christian ministries. Reporter Josh Wood points out that Ark Encounter and TACTICA weren’t the only ones bragging about shoving Jesus into these trainings:

Northern Kentucky’s Fort Thomas Police Department, which sent an officer and a German Short Haired Pointer named Bulleit to the Ark Encounter’s third annual canine conference in February summed up the event as “4 days of training, speeches and gospel sermons,” according to a report obtained by The Courier Journal under Kentucky’s open records law.

The most important element of the article may be the pathetic response from the Kentucky State Police:

In a statement to The Courier Journal, KSP spokesperson Sherry Bray said: “The KSP trooper who attended advised that evangelical speeches/scripture memorization were conducted during breaks and not during canine training and were entirely voluntary.”

Bray added the canine handler’s “chain of command reviewed the curriculum, which appeared informative and cost-effective.”

That’s ridiculous. You don’t go to Ark Encounter and receive a religious message only on breaks. That makes as much sense as saying you attended a megachurch sermon for the secular parts; the religious message is baked into the whole damn thing. Everyone involved made clear that the training and the proselytizing were part of the same event. The gospel message wasn’t some optional add-on.

Notice also how another government officials said that the religious messages were both optional and “a very small part” of the event—two ideas that sound contradictory:

Maj. Philip Ridgell, a Boone County Sheriff’s Office spokesperson, told The Courier Journal Boone County canine handlers were invited to attend the conference for free. He said the religious aspects were only “a very small part” of the conference and that officers were not required to participate in them.

It’s such a weak excuse. Ark Encounter doesn’t minimize religious proselytizing. It’s what they do. Promoting Creationism isn’t just a teeny tiny little part of seeing the fake boat. Without it, you’ve got nothing. And if the religious elements were optional, how many officers chose not to participate? You can always say the preaching is optional, then make it virtually impossible to escape.

I don’t say that lightly: In fact, the article even brings up how TACTICA insists on proselytizing at its trainings, even when they’re with government officials:

In a 2022 video posted on Facebook by a Michigan church, the group’s founder, former Kalamazoo, Michigan, police officer Ryan Rought, said TACTICA enters into agreements with governments in countries like Costa Rica and Ecuador where they offer to train police, but only if they are allowed to openly proselytize during the training.

…

“We always joke that we’re probably the only missionaries that have Bibles and bullets in our budget, but it’s true,” Rought said in the video. “But, really that whole police side and the tactical side ... it’s really a very small portion of what we do. The heart of what we do is the disciple making and making those disciple-makers.”

Either the cops are lying, or the religious leaders are lying, or they’re all lying because nothing about their training or faith taught them to be ethical and honest.

It’s unclear if there’s anything that can be done to stop this if the State Police don’t give a damn. Even if a group files a lawsuit, this feels like a long-shot. But no one seems to be arguing about the core issue here: Taxpayers in Kentucky are funding faith-based training seminars for police dogs. Those seminars are run by people whose primary goal isn’t to train animals but to convert people and spread their version of the gospel message.

No non-Christian group would ever be given the same opportunity. So the message from Kentucky law enforcement is very clear: Christianity is above the law.

While they may pretend otherwise, their actions say something else entirely.

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