Dogs are the purest creatures to walk the earth. We might be biased, but you’d be hard pressed to convince us otherwise. They’re kind, adorable, and just want to love us, which is certainly more than human beings have earned from dogs. To coin an appropriately popular phrase, we don’t deserve dogs.
On average, security guards earn around $30,000 annually. Officers who handle dogs earn more because they often live with the dog they handle. The dogs don’t earn anything because, well, they’re dogs. But their jobs are no less dangerous and they have much more capable sniffers than humans do. You’ve probably seen K-9 officers before with dogs in some manner of police authority vest, looking cute but very official. Jake is one of these dogs and he experienced quite the scare in the line of duty.
Music festivals of all kinds usually attract at least a few individuals who will attempt to smuggle illegal substances onto the festival grounds. This trend has grown in recent years, so security has tightened on people attempting to bring contraband into them. Human officers can’t possibly search every bag going into a venue with thousands of people, so they require the help of K-9 noses. And these dogs are good at their jobs.
The electronic dance music festival Holy Ship! takes place on the Norwegian Epic cruise ship. Jake — a Golden Retriever — was sniffing people and their belongings as they boarded the festival ship, doing his job like a good boy. He found drugs on a person and the person was detained. It wasn’t until shortly after that that Jake started to display strange behavior.
He began having seizures and swiftly losing motor functions, scaring the officer handling him. They suspected that during his drug detection, he inhaled or ingested some of the drugs he discovered and was having an overdose reaction. Not knowing exactly what was happening, Jake was given Narcan, a drug commonly used to reverse heroin overdoses. He was promptly taken to the vet.
The person who was detained ended up having drugs on their person, including unprescribed amphetamines, sedatives, and ecstasy. The 33-year-old man was arrested and charged with possession of controlled substances without a prescription. We unofficially charge him with hurting Jake.
K-9 officers are there to keep people safe. Generally, their job is to keep drugs and weapons away. While dentists might be in the top 10 most trusted professions, we may be taking K-9 officers for granted. They certainly were never born thinking they were going to have to sniff drugs out of a human’s pockets. But they do it and they do it well.
Human beings get a billion colds every year. Usually pretty mild, symptoms subside fairly quickly. There’s really no benchmark from which to gauge the effect of an unclear amount of controlled substances ingested by a dog (especially since they can’t exactly talk to us). This made Jake’s situation especially frightening. He’s a trooper though. At the vet, Jake stabilized and isn’t expected to experience any long-lasting effects from his dance with the disco biscuits. In the future, we think he’ll probably stick with regular biscuits instead.
We’re glad you’re okay, Jake. Good boy.