home state of Mississippi for decades. He teaches and certifies his dogs’ professional handlers, too. And thanks to yearly recertifications and a network of friends and colleagues spanning the region, he keeps in touch with the countless dogs he’s trained. He does what he can to keep track of them once they retire from the force, as well. In the case of Ringo, however, Hare was almost too late. “I got a call from a woman I knew who’d heard from someone who’d been through one of my courses that they thought they’d seen Ringo at a kill shelter.” Hare called the shelter in Jackson, Mississippi, where his tipster thought Ringo might be. And he asked them to spare the expertly trained, crime-fighting yellow Lab from lethal injection. “Sure enough it was him. He’d been turned over,” Hare says, his voice breaking. “It could have gone very badly. If he’d gone to another shelter, it could have gone any number of ways.” Now, Ringo lives with Hare and spends his days at the same training center where he first learned to put his nose to use. “He’s a great dog. He doesn’t move quite as quickly as he used to. But he’s a love bird,” Hare tells me. “Sometimes we’ll put him into rotation and let him have a little work. His sniffer’s not as good as it used to be, but he enjoys it.” Ringo’s handler who’d left him at the shelter received a demotion within his department – and a stern phone call from Hare. “I laid into him pretty good,” Hare tells me. “If he’d just called me in the first place, I’d have come and got Ringo. I don’t know why people do what they do. I know some of these guys don’t like
to hand over control.” The handler, detective Carl Ellis, was also named and shamed in the New York Times . But there’s no way to ensure that every department finds a safe and loving home for its retired dogs, whether their skills are outdated or they’re simply old. For a drug-sniffing dog who’s about to retire, the difference between being a close-call rescue like Ringo and rolling around on the floor at home like Tulo for the rest of your life remains “completely at the discretion of the departments,” Hare says, “at least until there’s a public outcry.” Ringo wasn’t a near casualty of changing laws. He was just old. But it has helped raise the alarm among trainers and trendsetters like Hare about outmoded marijuana sniffers’ uncertain fates. Marijuana legalization, Hare tells me, comes up most often when departments in the process of purchasing dogs from him find themselves having to anticipate the as yet unknown updates to their local legal landscape. “I get asked all the time if you can train a dog off marijuana,” Hare says. “I use the analogy that if you learn a standard before an automatic, sooner or later you’re going to reach down and try to shift with that brake.”
“Sometimes we’ll put him into rotation and let him have a little work. His sniffer’s not as good
as it used to be, but he enjoys it.”
American Consequences 27
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