ONE I YOU CAN'T TEACH AN OLD DRUG-SNIFFING DOG NEW LAWS
There’s no easy way to tell a drug-sniffing dog he’s fired.
Amid the quickening march of marijuana legalization at the state and – hey, who knows – maybe soon even federal levels, dogs trained to detect cannabis aren’t useful to police departments the way they once were.
By Alice Lloyd
Retraining an expensively bred, expertly educated German Shepherd, Labrador Retriever, or Belgian Malinois to sniff out everything but the smelliest drug on the market is both costly and imprecise. It’s also not worth the legal headache now that defense attorneys can successfully argue for the illegality of a car search spurred by a cannabis-trained dog in any jurisdiction where carrying weed is no longer a crime. Culture changes. And the law changes with it. But when you’re a dog, a smell stays the same.
And to expertly trained drug-sniffing dogs – still the best smellers in the business, better than robots and mini-pigs imported from Vietnam – marijuana still smells like a Schedule I controlled substance. Even in Colorado. Tulo Topples the Trash Cans Consider Rifle, Colorado’s favorite working dog – a yellow Labrador Retriever named Tulo. He retired in January after a productive seven years on the police force. “The fact is, he was trained to alert on marijuana,” says Tulo’s handler and trainer
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