The four-year-old labs are certified in "fish detection," which may help officers crack down on poaching.
Fishermen can be pretty clever with where they hide their illegally-captured fish.
"We've had people hide them in secret compartments in boats. We've had them hide them in vehicles, rocks, all kinds of places to prevent us from finding them," said Cpt. Ryan Healy of the state environmental conservation police.
Healy said there are laws about when you can catch fish and how many you can take, but sometimes fishermen can get pretty sneaky. To that end, police trained three Labrador retrievers to sniff out those bad actors and their fish.
The labs have been in service since 2012 doing things like evidence detection and tracking. Over the course of three weeks, Healy said they got certified in "fish detection," which he believes will help officers crack down on poaching and save resources.
In the past, "the officer would have to sit there for a period of time to try to detect where they were hiding them," Healy said. "Or the officer would only look in those obvious spots, say, on a boat -- in a live well, or in a cooler sitting on the deck. They don't have the nose that the dog does. They're not going to be able to detect that hidden compartment that's in there ... whereas a dog is going to be able to utilize its nose, which is much better than ours, and find those fish that we otherwise couldn't find, or would take us quite a bit of time to find."
The dogs are four years old, and each has its own handler. Healy said they haven't been employed in the field to sniff out fish yet, but as the weather warms up, he expects the animals to be put into service at boating launches all around the state.
In the fall, Healy said police hope to certify dogs to sniff out other types of illegally-poached game: things like turkey and waterfowl.
