14 DAY TRIAL // This past Tuesday, 75 alleged drug dealers were arrested by police officers in northern Italy and Rome. The traffickers are now facing several accusations, one of which is that they have been using so-called drug-mule dogs in order to transport cocaine to and from several locations worldwide.
The dogs used by these people in order to smuggle drugs were reportedly made to swallow bags of cocaine and later on killed and sliced open so that the traffickers could get them back.
Information shared with the public says that, throughout the years, these 75 individuals most likely abused and later on slaughtered roughly 50 dogs.
For the time being, the authorities in charge of overseeing this case are yet to figure out how it was exactly that the dogs were made to gulp down the bags of cocaine.
More so given the fact that one such bag weighed about 2.8 pounds (roughly 1.3 kilograms).
Despite the fact that the cocaine these dogs were made to transport was wrapped up in plastic bags, specialists explain that the packages could have burst open at any moment.
Needless to say, this would have translated into the animals' dying a slow and agonizing death as a result of their becoming exposed to whopping amounts of pure cocaine.
According to Daily Mail, using such drug-mule dogs allowed the drug dealers to by-pass security checks, simply because few officers ever think about looking for drugs inside a dog's stomach.
"Courtesy" of their wishing to transport significant amounts of cocaine in one go, the traffickers are believed to have mainly resorted to relatively large breeds such as St. Bernards, Great Danes, Labradors and Mastiffs.
The idea of using large dogs in order to illegally transport drugs is by no means a new one.
Thus, it was only a few years ago when a 4-year-old sheepdog was rescued by customs officials after it was discovered that it had several small packages of cocaine inside its stomach.