Around the nations, scores of police dogs are being forced into retirement because their skills are obsolete and no longer needed given that more and more states are legalizing marijuana, the Associated Press reports.

The Commonwealth of Virginia, which will legalize possession of up to one ounce of marijuana on July 1st, will retire 13 drug-sniffing dogs.  Apollo, Aries, Bandit, Blaze, Jax, Kane, Mater, Nina, Reno, Sarge, Thunder, Zeus and Zoey are being adopted by their handlers, the canine director for the Virginia State Police said.

Training a police dog can cost $15,000, and it is virtually impossible to un-train a dog to signal when it hits on marijuana, even though other drugs may or may not be present.  A new generation of drug dogs are being trained to find other illegal drugs like ecstasy; cocaine, heroin and methamphetamines.

Drug traffickers, including those moving large quantities of pot, are taking advantage of the cross-trained dogs where marijuana possession is now legal.  When stopped, suspects will burn some pot to cause the dog to alert, meaning that the old basis of probably cause because of marijuana is voided.  The traffickers then get released with a misdemeanor for using marijuana in a car, even though they may have other illegal drugs in the car.

Because dogs cannot be untrained to alert to marijuana, new dogs must be obtained to search for illegal drugs.  And because those dogs cost thousands of dollars to train and maintain, many smaller police departments are forgoing replacing dogs.

Retired dogs don’t seem to be complaining, though.  “The dog is actually living a wonderful life,’” Cumberland County Sheriff Darrell Hodges said of Mambo, a recently retired Belgian Malinois. “He has his own bedroom in a house and is getting spoiled rotten.”