Jane Desmond, PhD, is professor of anthropology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and author of several books on how we live with animals, including most recently "Displaying Death and Animating Life: Human-Animal Relations in Art, Science, and Everyday Life" from the University of Chicago Press, 2016. The views expressed here are solely the author's.

(CNN) There's a new victim of the opioid crisis -- and this one has four legs.

Police dogs are overdosing on new narcotics they sniff out in the line of duty. Fentanyl, 50-100 times stronger than morphine, and carfentanil, a tranquilizer used on elephants that can be 10,000 times more powerful, are being mixed in with illegal heroin for a deadly high. Ingesting an amount as small as a poppy seed of these drugs can kill a dog.

Jane Desmond

No one knows exactly how many police dogs suffer from such overdoses, because there is as yet no national database, a situation the University of Illinois veterinarians are trying to correct. We do know that, according to data from Working Dog HQ run by Dr. Maureen McMichael, 36 police dogs died in 2015 from contact with heroin.

These new drugs are exponentially more powerful. As the opioid crisis continues to expand, more and more dogs will be at risk.

But there is a solution. By uniting the efforts of law enforcement, ambulance crews, EMTs and state legislators, we can save these dogs from dying in the line of duty. Dr. McMichael and her fellow University of Illinois College of Veterinary Medicine colleague Dr. Ashley Mitek have developed the "Working Dog Treat and Transport protocol," which they describe as a guide of what to do if a dog overdoses.

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