A Retired Police K9 Starts a Second Career at the Courthouse

He spent eight years on patrol and retired sound, which is rarer than it should be.

Rather than let him go to seed on a sofa, his handler put him through a comfort-dog programme, and he now works the courthouse — sitting with children in the waiting room before they give evidence, and sometimes on the stand beside them.

The handler says the training was the easy part. The hard part was teaching a dog who spent most of a decade being deliberately imposing to be entirely uninteresting.

He is, by all accounts, extremely good at being uninteresting.