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Dear Stoner: Since dogs can identify expensive truffles, drugs and all other sorts of stuff, I was wondering if I could train a dog to smell for specific terpenes in cannabis. I’d never try to do it, but could I if I wanted to?
Pickford
Dear Pickford: Dogs can sniff out bombs, weed and, in some cases, even human cancer. Training them to find a specific terpene sounds more than doable, as cannabis terpenes like limonene (citrus), linalool (lavender), myrcene (hops and mangoes) and pinene (pine) can all be extracted and purchased for aromatherapy and other uses (like shitty weed vapes, for example.)
Unsplash/Isaac Burke
But you still have at least two big challenges in training a dog to ID specific terpenes. For starters, terpenes are everywhere, so it’d be easy to confuse a dog trying to spot linalool or pinene when flowers or trees are nearby. Cannabis strains also have specific blends of terpenes, so I don’t know how a dog would show you which terpene it’s smelling, when there could be five or six filling up its nostrils. So, could it be done? Probably — but it would take years, if not multiple generations of dogs, to learn how to find a specific strain or terp and communicate that discovery to you.
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