How do you explain a false positive hit by your dog in court?

Pseudo narcotics are non-narcotic. They are not illegal to own. That is a primary fact that everyone in drug dog training needs to remember.

With this in mind, there is only one place for the use of pseudo narcotics in dog training. That’s during the initial few weeks of scent association where the dogs come into contact with the drugs on their toys or in a sand lot where they dig up toys with a small amount of pseudo sprinkled on the ground over the buried toy.

Once this period is past and the dog is moved on to real drugs, pseudo should not be used again.

If a K-9 officer uses pseudo throughout the dog’s career, it is only a matter of time in court before he is going to be asked "Does your dog indicate on anything other than narcotics?" The answer to that question would be "YES." If the next question was "Then when your dog indicated on the vehicle on the interstate, how did you know whether the vehicle contained narcotics or a substance that smelled like narcotic?" That can be a difficult question to answer.

Of course the answer could be "My dog only indicates on the odor of narcotics. There are other substances that have the same odor as the narcotics. These substances are used to train narcotic detection dogs." The courts would then have to rule on the facts of the case and set a precedent for future narcotics dog training.

There are other facts in this issue that I do not care to go into on a web site that is open to the public. Too many defense lawyers float the web and I can't see helping them anymore than I have to.