WHAT AN ASSHOLE!

Chad Larner, training director of the police K-9 Training Academy for Macon County, Illinois, said there are about 275 K-9s in the Land of Lincoln, but many will have to be put down if pot is legalized.

To hell with it let’s do it up right according to Larner all of these faithful working dogs are slated for death.

Some police officials in Illinois are warning that their specially trained, drug-sniffing police dogs will have to be euthanized if the state legalizes marijuana.

Calls to legalize pot are growing in Illinois as users hope for acceptance of their favorite substance and politicians eye another source of tax dollars, but some police dog trainers say that an unintended consequence will befall the state’s police dogs if laws are changed to make pot legal, the Pantagraph recently reported.

Chad Larner, training director of the police K-9 Training Academy for Macon County, Illinois, noted that police dogs are carefully trained for their specific purpose, and the idea of trying to retrain them not to identify marijuana would amount to “extreme abuse” of the dogs.

Larner said there are about 275 K-9s in the Land of Lincoln, but many will have to be put down if pot is legalized. Because of their extensive training, the dogs are not like regular dogs, Larner said.

I take most exception to the comments from Larner who should know better as a trained specialist. The others quoted were quoted because of their rank not because they know anything about law enforcement, dogs, or common sense.

Not all of the 275 working dogs are necessarily “dope dogs.” Some dope dogs will also be patrol dogs. It is the handler that determines the task. Setting up for a suspect track, a missing person, or a patrol apprehension (bite work) sometimes requires different collars and leads itself a signal to the K-9 as to the task at hand. Training frequency can also emphasize one set of skills over another.

Most working dogs have a work life of seven years. Police agencies do not, as a general rule, euthanize retiring working dogs. They are given a retirement party and placed in a suitable home, often times with their handler.

As a final alternative, the dogs could give marijuana the “Rico” treatment. Rico was one of our more successful but unsung dope dogs. Rico posed for the press after quite a few seizures, but he rarely made it into the paper. Rico exhibited a double alert around marijuana and only marijuana. His first alert was to sit. His secondary, marijuana only alert, was to then pop a raging hard-on. And he stayed that way until we put the marijuana in the evidence locker. He coulda been a star!