What Qualities Make a Good Drug Dog

Series Summary

With a few exceptions in East LA and the heart of the Ozarks, drugs dogs are not born, they are made. Mysterious men in black jumpsuits tape the dog's eyelids open and force them to watch Scarface and Snoop videos as they administer shocks to sirloin-flavored electric bones. Or dogs are force-fed every illegal drug imaginable, which results in a prodigious party appetite worthy of a Keith Richards bender. They become addicts of the most incurable kind. Why else would these dogs willingly brave the moldy back of a flower-covered VW van or a pungent school locker full of Pink Floyd pictures and resin-stained book covers? These dogs need their fix just as much as Scooby needs his snack. Or perhaps they are simply trained by a professional to get their kicks by making master happy.

Ray Varner has trained dogs for the Air Force as well as for law enforcement agencies. In this series of free videos, he explains what qualities make a good drug dog, then covers basic obedience training essential to the job. If Fido keeps his ears pinned back and his tail between his legs when you try to teach him to fetch, he may not be drug dog material. But if he jumps with excitement, then all you have to do is teach him to find a bag of marijuana or a vial of cocaine before he can play fetch. Then Fido will be ready for the drug squad.

Video Transcript

"I am Captain Ray Varnom with Page Police Department for Expert Village. com. What I wanted to do today is give just give you a little bit of insight in how to find a detector dog. The Detector dog is a dog that can do any number of things it can do search and rescue, drug detection, bomb detection, cadaver dogs, anything that has to do with searching, but when you are doing this in trying to find a dog that will work for this you need to find the genetic drives in the dog that is in this dog that we don't have to teach. What we want to do is we want to show you a couple of dogs here that have these genetic drives, one of them would be prey drive, retreive drive, play drive, and also hunting drive. Each one of them we'll try to explain, what we'll do is take a ball out now, this dog here is a 7 year old german shepherd that has no training. We just received him for some detection work but, we wanted to do is the first thing is we wanted to show you that this type of drive is in them, no matter what age it is; it can be a puppy it can be 10 to 20 years old it doesn't matter it has these drives in them. So, I'll show you this, I'll pull the ball out and you can see he is just sitting there he is just looking around but, watch what happens when I pull the ball out and just show it to him. Seus! so you can see he is locked in on that ball, he is like I want to do that ball. Put it around now, what we want to do is when we do this and we show him the ball, we want to play a game with him. When we play a game with him I'll try to play hide and seek. As you can see he really wants this ball. So what I'll do is play a game with him and I'll take him over and he'll turn him around and I'll go "look at the ball, look what I got, look what I got. Now just hold him right there. I'll bring it up and I'll play a game with him. Here's the ball and I'll pretend like I put it right there. I'll put it there, where is it at? Now, I'll bring it back to him and show him that I don't have it anymore. Where's the ball at, where's the ball at? well find it; then we just let him search Now, the hunting drive will be how long he searches and he'll keep looking until he finds it and then you praise him everything is positive reinforcement. It's a big game to him now that was obviosly easy, when we start training it's called "The Easy Easy". We want to do an easy find, an easy retrieve, and an easy alert, everything is easy to him. "