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or a plastic baggy. An article by expert Barry Cooper says dogs may even be trained to detect the
presence of marijuana in as little as one day. The
problem, however, is that the discrimination training is often incomplete or missing all together.
Discrimination training is conditioning the dog to
differentiate between the marijuana and the tennis ball or plastic bag. As a result, there is no definite way to tell if the dog is alerting to an illegal
drug or the tennis bag in the backseat.
Man’s Best Friend or Foe?
The Truth Behind Drug Dogs. A University of California study provided a
Police officers use a range of aides in their effort in the war on drugs, but none are as controversial as man’s best friend. The Department has
used canines to sniff out bombs since 1940 and
incorporated illegal substances by the seventies.
Dogs are used in airports, traffic stops and school
searches, but this begs the question: How do they
do it? Dogs are not born with the innate ability to
alert someone when they smell marijuana, ingredients for methamphetamine, or a bomb, they
are trained to perform a job.
Whether it is a treat or a belly scratch, the main
ingredient in positive reinforcement is the outward show of approval from their owner that they
interpret based on their owner’s tone of voice.
Dogs have no sense of right and wrong. The conditioning they undergo is not simply, “tell me if
there is this smell” it is “if I find this smell, my
owner is really happy with me, I like it when he’s
happy with me.”
Dogs feed off of the body language of thei ȁ