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The legalization of marijuana in Minnesota marked the end of an era for the canine officers of the Olmsted County Sheriff’s Office.
Jango, a 9-year-old German shepherd, and Cobra, a 10-year-old Belgian Malinois, are set to retire soon after the legislation goes into effect Aug. 1, Capt. Ryan Mangan said. They are the department’s last K-9s trained to detect cannabis, a skill the department stopped teaching new dogs years ago and likely never will again.
Mangan said Jango and Cobra, who were already reaching the end of their careers, will be relegated to patrol work before their retirement in September because they likely can’t be trained to stop detecting marijuana, which could compromise narcotics searches.
Replacing them will be expensive. A dog trained to do both patrol work and drug detection will cost the department nearly $12,000, Mangan said. And the death of another dog on the team dealt an unexpected blow to the unit.
“Now we’re kind of scrambling to come up with a plan to be able to get a new dog purchased and get the K-9 team up and running again,” he said. “Something like that is a big budget item.”
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