Legal cannabis in Canada may mean big changes for the country’s police canine units, according to a report from the CBC. Officer Jeff Rotinsky, a canine handler with the Winnipeg Police Service in the province of Manitoba, told local media that his police dog Mya will see less work once legalization goes into effect next week.
“What happens is, come Oct. 17, if I deploy my dog, she’s trained on the agenda of marijuana,” Rotinsky said. “It’s now a legal substance, that would now classify as an illegal search if she hit on that.”
Rotinsky said that Mya, a nine-year-old Belgian Malinois, has been trained to alert officers to many substances that are presently illegal.
“Those [substances] include methamphetamine, heroin, crack cocaine, cocaine,” Rotinsky said. “She’s marijuana trained with hash, hash oil, psilocybin—which is magic mushrooms—and she’s also trained on ecstasy as well, and imprinted on fentanyl.”
But Mya hasn’t been trained to indicate which substance she has found.
“She can’t lift one paw and say this is marijuana, lift the other paw and say this is cocaine,” Rotinsky said.
Mya isn’t being retired just yet, though. She can be used in cases when police are executing a search warrant and expect to find other substances.
“There’s a lot of questions that still need to be answered and that’s why we don’t want to stop and phase out Mya as well as our other dogs,” Rotinsky said.
Mya is the only police dog in Winnipeg that has been trained to detect fentanyl, a valuable skill for protecting her human colleagues from danger.
“So we’re going to keep her because of the imprinting on fentanyl, that’s a huge asset for us as well,” said Rotinsky.
K-9 Skills Invaluable
Rotinsky said