They Had One Job: Airport Sniffer Dogs FAILED To Detect Drugs - But Did Locate Cheese

Six sniffer dogs at Manchester Airport were able to locate passengers’ cheese and sausages - but totally failed to detect Class A drugs.

The team of detector hounds were trained to search for illegal drugs, tobacco, cash and “bush meat”, although they did not sniff out any heroin or cocaine during a six-month period studied by the Independent Chief Inspector of Borders and Immigration.

The dogs, who cost £1.25 million to house and operate, each had a speciality and were trained to detect either money, products of animal origin (POAO), tobacco or drugs.

Despite detecting no drugs, the dogs did help seize more than 46,000 cigarettes, 60kg of tobacco, 181kg of illegal meat, and £28,000 cash.

The report said: “Heroin and cocaine were assessed as ‘very high’ priority within both air passengers and freight.

"Yet, according to the data provided by Border Force, the dogs had made no Class A drugs detections in the period November 2014 to June 2015.

One job: The dogs failed to find any Class A drugs (Rex/File pic)

"When deployed, the POAO dog made multiple accurate detections, but most were of small amounts of cheese or sausages, wrongly brought back by returning British holidaymakers and posing minimal risk to UK public health.”

The report said that the seizures represented a low return on the £1.25 million spent on new kennels and the costs of operating the unit.

The report concluded there needed to be a review of which flights were targeted and how the dogs were best used.

Despite their failure in finding Class A drugs, the dogs were successful on three occasions at detecting some illegal drugs, finding small amounts of Class B substances.

They also found tablets of human growth hormone, Viagra and Bromazepam.

Manchester Airport is the third largest in the UK and handled 22 million passengers between 2014 and 2015, with flights arriving from 200 destinations - the most of any UK airport.

Top pic; Thinkstock/File pic