A Policeman's Best Friend

There won't be any pictures with this post, for obvious reasons.

Australian policemen love their dogs.

I don't know why this is so -- whether it's a quirk in the local laws, or simply that some police commissioner sometime was a big dog person -- but they use them for everything.

Upon arriving in Melbourne, we were lined up in the customs shed while not one, but two different dogs ran around and sniffed our belongings. One appeared to be checking for contraband plants and meats (both Australia and New Zealand are even stricter on this point than the United States, for understandable reasons, but the New Zealanders use X-ray machines instead). The other was probably a drug dog.

Dogs reappeared at the Harbour Party in Sydney, where an intimidating phalanx of uniformed officers and dogs manned a defensive line right behind the ticket booths. As I entered, the dogs suddenly ran right by me to point excitedly at a bag of garbage. (I wasn't carrying anything of interest to a drug dog. I don't know about the garbageman.)

And at the departure lounge at Sydney airport, we were visited by what I assume were bomb-sniffing dogs.

If anyone who is reading this knows anything about Australian law enforcement, I'd love to know why dogs are the police tactic of choice in that country.