Years ago, at the Guadalajara airport while I was retrieving my suitcases in the baggage claim area, something unusual happened. I saw a yellow Labrador Retriever sniffing around the carousel. I figured he was looking for fruit, bombs, or drugs. I didn’t give it a second thought until he stopped dead in his tracks and sat next to my luggage.
My wife had once been stopped by a Beagle that had done the same thing. There was no barking or obvious signal. The dog just sat next to her until an inspector arrived. My wife had forgotten that she put a banana in her purse. No big deal. It was not as though she were running an international fruit smuggling operation. The banana was just the leftover dessert from the lunch they had served on the airplane. Nevertheless, the inspector confiscated it. The message was clear. “Life is short. Eat dessert first.”
But I knew that I wasn’t carrying any fruit. As for bombs, I once had a suitcase set off the electronic explosives sensor at the Los Angeles Airport. Turns out, it was a one-pound bag of French roast coffee I was bringing back from my vacation in Guatemala. (Note to Elon Musk and the Department of Government Efficiency: Don’t fire all the bomb-sniffing dogs just yet. Your robotic bomb detector isn’t quite ready for prime time). Let’s face it. Even a mongrel street dog could have told the difference between a caffeine high and high explosives. At any rate, I wasn’t carrying either on this trip.
As for drugs – not a chance. I take great pride in never having smoked a joint. Not even after recreational marijuana became legal in California. I wasn’t carrying any Alice B. Toklas brownies. No CBD oils. No vape pens. No hookahs. I don’t even own any hemp underwear. Though now that I think about it, I wonder what therapeutic benefits might arise when wearing hemp jockey shorts. And do you suppose those benefits might last longer than four hours? Oh well, getting back to my story, I couldn’t figure out why McGruff, the Crime Fighting Dog, decided to park his patoot next to my luggage.
Pretty soon, a uniformed officer showed up and asked if I had any fruits or vegetables in my bag. I didn’t. Any other food products? Nothing but some dog biscuits. At that time, I owned a Basset Hound. She was kind of a finicky eater, so I was glad to find a brand of treats that measured up to her epicurean standards. They were called MarroBones. Each biscuit looked like a slice of bone with a dark spot of marrow in the center. For some reason, it was getting difficult to find these American-made treats down here in Mexico. So, during my semiannual visits to my home in California, I would stock up on a supply to bring back. I had four bags in my luggage.
It never dawned on me that store-bought dog biscuits sealed in their original packages would be cause for concern. Did the Mexican authorities think American dog biscuits harbored some plague that might wipe out the entire crop of Mexican dog biscuits? I opened my suitcase and handed the officer one of the packages so he could read the ingredients. The label said they contained real beef bone marrow. Apparently, that was a no-no. In my defense, I pointed out that it also said the marrow was cooked. But that was too fine a distinction for either the inspector or his supervisor. It was a foreign meat product and had to be confiscated.
That yellow Lab had probably spent days, maybe weeks, sniffing out nothing but the occasional apple or banana – nothing that would be personally appealing to a dog. Today, he’d hit the mother lode. I’ll never forget the look on the dog’s face as he sat triumphantly next to my four bags of imported gourmet doggie delicacies. Unfortunately, there seemed to be some debate between the dog handler and his supervisor. It was unclear whether the dog would be the beneficiary of my misfortune, or if my contraband would have to be thrown into the nearest hazardous waste incinerator.
Nobody asked my opinion. But if they had, I’d have voted for the dog. He had managed to sniff out those treats even though they were in hermetically sealed bags surrounded by my dirty laundry inside a zipped-shut plastic suitcase. That’s got to be worth something. If his masters welshed on this reward, he might not be so quick to signal the alarm the next time I came through.
As I was leaving the scene of my crime, I looked back at the dog. You didn’t have to be Doctor Dolittle to know what that pooch was thinking. “Life is short. Eat dessert first.”
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