Longtime drug-sniffing dogs are having to unlearn how to alert their handlers to marijuana's presence in states where weed is now legal. That's the case in Washington state. The dog in this image is their newest scent-detection expert, Dusty. She is a drug-sniffing dog who doesn't detect marijuana.


Meanwhile, other police departments are working on desensitizing their dogs to the smell they worked so hard to learn to detect — I'm guessing this means that they're getting exposed to a lot of weed, letting their handlers know it's there, and then are systematically being ignored. Sad face.

Lucky Dusty. It's kind of like if it was suddenly announced that you wouldn't have to take a language in order to graduate. It leaves Dusty so much more time to smoke up.


Pot-sniffing dogs could find alternate employment with a company like Dogs Finding Drugs, which rents out dogs to workplaces and homes where bosses or parents or roommates suspect drug use. Or they could just do pro bono work, lending their services to stoners who have misplaced their stash. Now, that'd be awesome.

Related stories from TheDogs: