Dog shooter would have been OK in Mass, so long as he claimed the pit was 'worrying his livestock'.
This is just plain wrong for a situation like the one described and the kind of advice that will turn one into a PP in the blink of an eye ... unless the dog was also worrying his chickens, hogs, cows, etc. I do not know if the court will accept a pet parrot as "fowl" for the purpose of MGL.
A dog is not "livestock". MGL Chapter 140 Section 156 allows the shooting of a dog that is worrying livestock, persons of fowls. A pet dog does not fall into any of the definitions, my wife's declaration that our Mini Schnauzer is a person not withstanding. This is one of those cases where applying "common sense" to a general concept in the law will not necessarily lead to an accurate conclusion. People think things like "If I can protect a cow, I can protect my dog". Wrong. That section of MGL was written to protect the economic interest of farmers, not the person/dog relationship.
If you are in a dog shooting, you need to know how to act with the constraints of 140/156, and properly articulate such when making the report. "The dog was attacking me as well" has less credibility if added later than if included in a contemporaneous report(*).
Attorney Keith Langer has defended two dog shooting cases. He won both.
Another attorney I know lost a case because the defendant refused to say the dog was attacking him, and told the court "I shot that dog because he was attacking my dog".
Know the law, and know how to properly report an incident to document compliance with MGL.
Take Len's class and you will learn all this and more.
* - this is also true of including "black ice" on a motor vehicle accident report to avoid a surcharge