We need your help, Puppycide readers.

After over a year and a half of research, Puppycide Database Project is ready to publish our findings to date. Our research has uncovered a variety of trends related to police violence toward animals that has never before been understood: among our findings are statistics related to the involvement of children in police shootings of animals, the rate at which human beings are shot and killed by police aiming at pets as well as data on the relationship (or lack thereof) between a dog's breed and the likelihood that it will be harmed by a police officer.

This research is the first of its kind; we have found that widely-reported claims of "puppycide" statistics have been misleading, inaccurate and without a basis in research. It is the hope of all of us here at Puppycide Database Project that the publication of our research will result in further interest in the field. With luck, our findings will be reviewed and challenged. Those seeking to either reproduce or over-turn our findings will be required to construct there own databases. This publication could be a small but important step toward public transparency being established related to all forms of police violence.

In order for any of that to happen, we need your help.

To publish our findings, our researchers must complete a content analysis that will demonstrate to other researchers that the data we collect using our online form accurately represent the circumstances of the puppycides they document. To complete an analysis for one of the records in our database, we need a volunteer to answer a short list of multiple choice questions about a news article related to a specific puppycide. Reading the article and answering the questions for one Record takes 2 to 5 minutes.

Analyzing a record is simple, and only requires a volunteer to navigate to this page on the Puppycide Database Project website and follow the resulting on-screen instructions.

Each volunteers can analyze as many records as they want - but a volunteer cannot analyze a record that they have submitted to the database. Until our volunteers analyze a large enough sample of our database, we cannot publish our findings.

Late last year, we asked for help with analyzing records but the results we did not receive enough assistance. This year, let's make it happen!

In addition to analyzing a record, tell your friends about PuppycideDB on Twitter and Facebook and be sure to let them know that they can get involved as well.

This is a rare opportunity to make a real difference on an issue that matters. Perhaps you are concerned about the use of excessive force by police. Maybe you care animal welfare, or maybe you think the public should be able to know when their government shoots someone or their dog. Whatever your interest is in Puppycide Database Project, just a few minutes could change the course of these issues forever. Get started now!