Make Pot Legal, and the Cops Will Kill the Dogs?

Chad Larner, the director of the Maron County Illinois K-9 Training Academy needs to be reassigned immediately.

In an interview with The Pantagraph, he said that if the state legalizes recreational marijuana, it will likely have to euthanize "a number" of its pot-sniffing dogs because "retraining" the dogs would be "extreme abuse."

He also says sniffer dogs cannot be retired to become family pets; they must be killed because they are so poorly socialized.

Nonsense. 

If a non-coded behavior is not rewarded and is, in fact, discouraged with correction, it will fade quickly. Dogs are "retraining" themselves all the time, which is to why police dog trainers have to constantly work their sniffer dogs with rewards in order to keep them "in the game".

As for retired sniffer dogs becoming pets, that's true all the time.

Let's cut to the chase:  the real fear of police dog handlers is that if marijuana is legalized, sniffer dogs may not be needed at all.

Police sniffer dogs are often used to fake a reason to search a car or house, with the dogs cued to signal a false positive for that purpose. If marijuana is legalized, the rationale for a contrived search is going to be much harder to articulate, as there are not many cars rolling down the road with methamphetamine, crack, and heroin in the ashtray.

While marijuana has never been a "gateway drug" for harder drug abuse, it has certainly been a gateway drug for law enforcement searches, packed jails, and full employment for lawyers on both sides of the court room aisle.

Police departments, police unions, and police dog handlers know this, which is why some idiots, like Chad Larner, are willing to say and do anything to hold the dogs hostage unless we, as a nation, do not acquiesce to ruining lives and locking up millions of people a year through continued marijuana criminalization.

Marijuana is already legal in a number of states from California to Maine, and including Colorado, Vermont, Alaska, Washington, Massachusetts, Oregon, and Washington, D.C.

You know what has not happened in those states?  The killing of their drug sniffer dogs.

Bottom line:  Chad Larner needs to be shown the door. Someone who knows this little, and is working with police dogs, is a danger to the community.