He has his own bedroom in a house and is getting spoiled rotten. The dog is actually living a wonderful life. The ruling was later upheld by the Colorado Supreme Court. The court overturned the man’s drug possession conviction, finding that police did not have legal grounds to search his truck. The court found that Kilo’s alert was not a reliable indicator of illegal activity because the dog could not differentiate between cannabis and an illegal drug. Officers found a methamphetamine pipe containing white residue. Kilo, a Moffat County Sheriff’s Office dog trained on multiple drugs, alerted police to a man’s truck during a 2015 traffic stop. They don’t want any mistakes, so that is why they want to bring in new dogs,” he said.Ī 2017 ruling from the Colorado Court of Appeals solidified concerns that using cannabis-trained dogs in places where the drug is legal may not withstand legal challenges. “Once you train a behaviour in a dog, that never goes away. “The trend is everywhere,” said Don Slavik, executive director of the United States Police Canine Association.

Other states which legalised cannabis earlier have had to make similar adjustments. The sheriff said he’d like to purchase a second drug-sniffing dog, but is not sure when he will find the money in his budget. It’s early retirement for some drug-sniffing dogs – but many will be with their handlers (AP) His office also bought a new dog not trained on the scent of marijuana that dog will be used to detect other drugs. Sheriff Miller’s office retired one dog and is now using a second dog for tracking and apprehension duties only, not for drug detection. Using a dog that has been trained to detect all drugs except cannabis can help “guarantee he didn’t hit on marijuana, that he found heroin or something else,” Sheriff Miller added. Many police dogs are being forced into early retirement as the state prepares to legalise adult recreational use of cannabis on July 1 (AP)įor police, that means they can no longer be used to establish probable cause for a search.īedford County Sheriff Mike Miller said: “We won’t use our dogs trained in (cannabis) because that could be a defence an attorney would raise for a client, to say: ‘Which odour did the K-9 alert on - was it marijuana or was it an illegal drug?” The dogs also cannot distinguish between a small, legal amount of cannabis or a larger, still-illegal amount of the drug. The dogs were trained for multiple drugs alerts so it is impossible to tell whether they are indicating the presence of cannabis or an illicit drug. Some departments are unable to afford up to 15,000 dollars (£10,500) to buy and train a new dog, so they are disbanding their K-9 units. Most are in the process of purchasing and training new dogs to detect only illicit drugs, including cocaine, heroin and methamphetamines.

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