@tryptameanie 967571 wrote:
Police seem to be happy to use anything and I wouldn’t be surpised if some of them had no sens eof smell at all.
it may be the case in some bits of the US due to cost-cutting / lack of public sector, where K-9 officers get cheap/free dogs from animal rescues run by religious organisations – they also have one of the more friendlier, well spoken ones on the local cable TV encouraging people to rehome dogs and other animals. There is a video from the late 90s (might now be on youtube) where it goes badly wrong as a dog handler tries to pick up a semi-feral tom cat in the same way he would do with a dog without having properly befriended it first (this takes time). unsurprisingly, he gets clawed up and has to stop himself from swearing too badly in front of the granny lady from the church.
In Blighty drugs dogs can be any breed or mixture thereof (as can the police officers themselves) but both are trained to a certain level of comptency.
TVP in the past used a “dog on a string” that was abandoned by the new age travellers and landed up in a dogs home in order to shame this culture. I did think myself it was fucking stupid of the travellers to abandon a potentially very useful dog (consider how much drugs are often dropped or mislaid….)
the funniest one I saw was the Jack Russell/Norfolk Terrier cross that Essex Constabulary use; complete with stab proof vest with yellow/blue markings and VL identifier (M2VL – Essex Police radio callsign). The vest (which all police dogs now have) is needed on operational duty; when these dogs are retired if their handlers do not keep them for house pets (and are not themselves retiring from the job and moving to another region) they usually go to a rescue home as far north in Scotland as its possible to send them and are given new identities for their safety.
