SNIFFING IT OUT

Drug Dogs Find More Than $40,000 Of Drugs At Prisons

Stonewall Argus and Teulon Times -- It was a busy few weeks for
Sampson and Brew, the detector dogs at Stony Mountain Institution and
Rockwood Institution respectively.

Between March 22 and April 7 the two dogs intercepted and recovered
over $40,000 worth of marijuana, cocaine, and pills at their
institutions.

Christer McLauchlan, institution search coordinator and dog handler
for Stony Mountain Institution, is Sampson's handler and he said this
was a large amount of drugs to be intercepted within a few week period.

"That's fairly non-typical, it's a high amount for a short amount of
time," McLauchlan said. "It's definitely not typical of what goes on
here."

Drugs are a reality within prison institutions, and McLauchlan said
"it's an ongoing issue, it's one of the reasons we have the dogs."

McLauchlan said over 80 per cent of the inmates coming to Stony
Mountain Institution have substance abuse problems when they arrive.

The drug finds came within weeks of the 2006 Correctional Services of
Canada (CSC) Prairie Region Institutional Search Coordinator/Dog
Handler Conference, co-hosted by the Stony Mountain and Rockwood
Institutions in March.

McLauchlan feels the conference and the drug busts were mostly
coincidental, but adds that the conference was a good training event
that gave additional skills to search for drugs on possible suspects.

According to McLauchlan, all CSC dogs are are trained to be passive
detector dogs, which means they conduct their searches in a calm,
non-aggressive way.

"The dog puts its nose as close to the substance, then it sits down
and looks at the handler," said McLauchlan, adding that the dogs are
given their favorite toy as a reward for finding the illegal
substance. "It's a big game to them."

This method of training is called a positive indication system, and
McLauchlan said the detector dogs are never given food as a reward for
finding something.

In the US, many institution train their detector dogs to be active
detector dogs, where they will growl and bark aggressively when a
substance is found, but this method of training is not used anywhere
in Canada.

The detector dogs only have one handler and Sampson has been working
with McLauchlan for the past five years.

"Sampson comes home with me, no one else handles him," said
McLauchlan.