The Dogs of San Francisco

I’m not a huge fan of the militarization of the canine: training dogs to attack people isn’t something I’m happy with, and ‘drug sniffing dogs’ are often basically just used as an excuse to search people’s person, car, or home, after they have ‘alerted an officer’ by reacting not to a drug but to the officer wanting the dog to alert the officer.

I’ll make an exception for Elara, and those like her. She is trained to detect explosives, which I think we can all agree aren’t a great thing for folks to carry into concerts, conferences, airports, or my apartment building. This one was hanging around outside of a conference center in San Francisco, checking all the trucks dropping off stuff. She was also happy to greet all the truckers as long as they weren’t carrying hand grenades in their pants!