Police dog handlers are trained to control their dogs and to work together with them in challenging front line policing. This is an intense working partnership. The police dog training practices that we examined show how the establishing and sustaining of an emotional bond between the police handler and the dog is crucial to the success of the training itself. And the police dog-handler working partnership, for the entire career of the police dog, relies upon this very bonding, as essential to the fulfillment of their roles.

In this presentation we present a visual ethnographic account documenting the developing bond between trainee police dog handlers and general purpose police dogs.

We explore how dog emotions, particularly ‘fun’, are read and elicited by the handlers and how they are key to the police-human-dog dyad and we consider what is at stake for the dog in this entangled becoming-with the police officer.

Through an analysis of the role of fun in both training and on the ground police work, we demonstrate how translations of feelings and experience are enmeshed into circuits of actions that become valued police work. Our paper concludes by exploring the value for the dog in having fun within this biopolitical the framework of governance.