DOGGONE IT
Corporal Garrett Duncan. “And so, with the state of Colorado legalizing marijuana, Tulo was no longer very useful.” The day we discussed Tulo’s adjustment to retirement, Tulo’s three-year-old replacement – a dog named Macai, whom Duncan trained to detect every drug but cannabis – passed his certification test to take Tulo’s place. Any day now Tulo will start seeing Duncan leave for work every morning with Macai, who was until recently, the rookie. And Duncan honestly doesn’t know how Tulo’s going to handle it. For now, he’s making the best of their downtime. A working canine doesn’t get to play much. “As a puppy in his younger days, we’d try to conserve a lot of his energy,” Duncan explains. So there’s one obvious upside to Tulo’s funemployment. “He can go hiking, he can go fishing.” As we’re talking, however, Tulo is at peace: Stretched out on the floor, drooling, thumping his tail every time he hears his name. “He seems to really like his life.” Often, working dogs with obsolete skills will simply retire, as Tulo has, to lives of ease in their handlers’ warm and happy homes. They tend to adjust reasonably well, Duncan tells me. But he wasn’t thrilled to find himself weaning off the force at first. When Tulo started to notice the chief was tossing him fewer shifts, he staged a protest. Word spread quickly around the police department when, on one
With so many cannabis- trained canines retiring in the coming years, police departments can’t always be counted on to retire their dogs the right way. of the first days that Duncan went to work without him, Tulo launched a protest. “He kind of did get into the trash that day and tear through it,” Duncan recalls. If Tulo misses work, work misses him too... “These dogs just love going to work,” said police chief Tommy Klein, Duncan and, formerly, Tulo’s boss at the Rifle Police Department – where Tulo was “sort of a mascot.” “I think he’s having a hard time staying home with his owner,” says Klein, who seems to be speaking for the guys at the station as much as for their canine friend. Coming to Ringo’s Rescue In the absence of uniform regulation or aggregate data, police departments and dog trainers across the country do what they can to keep track of canine retirements. But with so many cannabis-trained canines retiring in the coming years, police departments can’t always be counted on to retire their dogs the right way. Eleven-year-old Ringo and his trainer, Randy Hare, learned that the hard way last fall. Hare has been training and selling drug- sniffing dogs to police departments in his
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March 2019
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