Ah, Lulu, we hardly knew you. Or at least the CIA, which tried to train you to sniff out bombs, hardly knew you.
Lulu the CIA dog who wouldn’t sniff bombs is the week’s most adorable internet hero
Lulu wouldn’t locate explosives. Instead, she located our hearts.
CIA / Twitter
Aja Romano wrote about pop culture, media, and ethics. Before joining Vox in 2016, they were a staff reporter at the Daily Dot. A 2019 fellow of the National Critics Institute, they’re considered an authority on fandom, the internet, and the culture wars.
The internet, however, fell in love with the sweet black Labrador — thanks to an uncharacteristically sentimental dispatch from the CIA’s official Twitter account about how the canine trainee was excused from her explosives-detection education because she just wasn’t that into ferreting out potential bombs.
The thread detailed Lulu’s emerging disinterest in her training — though it left out how intense and grueling the training and subsequent work life of a bomb-sniffing dog can be.
In the end, Lulu was retired from the training program and adopted by her handler — now she also gets to spend lots of time hanging out with her handler’s new trainee, Harry. Here’s Harry:
While the CIA was happy to let Lulu go, many observers following the story on Twitter had a harder time.
There were songs. The Department of Defense wished Lulu well. Lots of people offered to adopt her.
Many also expressed relief that Lulu had managed to escape a life spent serving in one of the nation’s most secretive and controversial agencies, given the CIA’s history of torturing prisoners, overthrowing governments, and training and arming guerrilla armies:
Despite the CIA’s critics, though, Lulu seems to have united people on at least one point: She’s a very, very good dog.
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