Page 445 - NIXBOOK

that the dog was alerting to marijuana also present that was not illegal and therefore the police seizure and search and
subsequent discovery of any other illegal anything was in fact not a legal search and then the case would be dismissed by the
judge. So a lot of police departments and sheriffs decided to retire their current drug dogs and get new ones. New ones that
would be trained to completely ignore marijuana and treat it like nothing special. Because once you train a dog to alert to a
specific odor, it is very difficult to untrain the dog and be able to be sure enough to testify in court that the dog had definitely
not alerted to that smell it had been originally trained to alert on. So there was a huge demand for fresh new dogs to train and
it created a state-wide shortage.

The trainer lady kept telling us “I’m going to find you a great dog. Only the best. I know you’re ready for one right now, but I’m
not going to settle for just a good dog, you’re going to get only the best,” she kept assuring us. After about 8 months though we
got tired of waiting and we cancelled our contract with her and got our money back. Back to square one, as they say.

So I went on the interwebs and started doing some research to see what other options we had for finding a drug dog source. I
looked for other dog trainers in Washington, then I started looking in Oregon, and California, and then I found a website for
“Southern Coast K9” in California. They currently had 54 (!!) dogs in stock; all handpicked from strong European bloodlines.
Then I saw the training facility was actually in, uh..Florida, which was literally just about as far from Poulsbo as one could get.
But the more I looked at their website, the more excited I got. They were a world-class training facility, and did I mention they
had 54 European working dogs in their kennels ready to go? The question was…would the department pay for me to go to a K9
school 3,000 miles away? 6,000 miles round trip?!?

Short answer: yes. It helped when I explained to the sergeant in charge of the K-9 program that I had found a good source for
dogs. Then I enticed him by suggesting that if he sent me to Florida to get the dog and the training, he might also need to come
along too, to, you know…”supervise” and hang out. My suggestion totally worked; he loved the idea. Actually, he decided to skip
the two weeks of watching me train part; instead he quickly convinced the Chief to send him there first to scout the place out
and pick a dog. Of course I really wanted to pick out the dog, but the Sergeant pulled rank and I couldn’t complain too much
because it was a done deal and I’d follow about a month later. Within a week, Sgt. Halsted had flown out there, rented a car
and a hotel room, and got a tour of the kennels. He liked what he saw and the trainers there brought out a bunch of dogs for
him to look over. He picked one out for us and left a check for $10,000 dollars with the trainers, who started training the dog to
detect street drug odors. With specific instructions to exclude marijuana training.

The dog was a two year old Belgian Malinois/German Shephard mix that that had arrived from Germany just a month earlier.
Although I had been envisioning a floppy-eared lab, I was not disappointed with a pointy-eared dog, because the one selected
definitely had the Command Presence I wanted. I was quite pleased with the Sergeant’s pick. A couple weeks later I flew down
there and started learning how to be a K9 handler.

Actually, let me back up a bit here. When I first got assigned as the department’s next K9 Handler, there was that really long
period of time where I was dogless, waiting for a partner. But while I was waiting I was also getting ready, and I was going to
trainings to prepare me. The first special course I attended was in Eastern Washington; a three day Washington State Patrol
sponsored training in highway drug interdiction, which is what it’s called when the police intercept and stop drug smugglers on
the road.

The students in the class were cops from a dozen other agencies across the state. Like all the other police trainings I attended,
the room was full of testosterone and sunglasses and big guys casually posturing and walking around with a swagger, carrying
their badges and guns on their off-duty belts.