Dogs and people. We’re two species that like each other. Thrive together. We’re both highly social animals. We’ve been partners for maybe 12 thousand years
Besides our mutual affection, we help each other out. We feed our dogs, give them a place to live, protect them. And dogs do what we need - whether it’s guard our campfire, help us hunt, herd our sheep, pull our sleds, guide the blind, sniff out illicit drugs, or search for lost people through swamps, forests and the rubble after 9/11 .
But how about this: help us live in harmony with nature?
These may be the “greenest” dogs yet.
This “green” dog, Gator, is a blue heeler. He passed up a promising career as a narcotics detection dog to be a scat detection dog at the Center for Conservation Canines. Gator’s expertise is in black bear, grizzly bear, fisher, maned wolf, cougar, jaguar, wolverine, orca whale, and bobcat.
Gator was retrained to use his techniques for narcotics detection to locate scat from endangered species.
Scat detection dogs are now being used to find samples in large remote landscapes (including the ocean), for use in a wide variety of population-based genetic and physiological studies. This information is applied to conservation problems around the world. It’s helping determine the causes and consequences of our human disturbances on wildlife, as well helping to figure out what we need to do to mitigate such impacts.
For example:
Human impacts on grizzly bears
Impacts of oil extraction on moose, caribou, and wolves in NE Alberta, Canada
Labrador retrievers sniff out ringed seals in the vast snow-covered plains of the far north
and, to me, the most amazing:
Monitoring the physiological health of resident killer whales
Most recently, these dogs are being trained to to match samples not just from a single species, but from the same individual.
Two thoughts struck me.
1. These scat detection dogs can locate whale scat by leaning over the edge of a boat. That’s a pretty amazing sense of smell. And these dogs aren’t from the breeds that you think of as scent specialists. They’re not bloodhounds. Which brings me to…
2. The “idea detection dog” is described as
… extremely energetic with an excessive play drive. These dogs will happily work all day long, motivated by the expectation of a tennis ball play reward upon sample detection. The obsessive, high-energy personalities of detection dogs also make them difficult to maintain as pets. As a result, they frequently find themselves abandoned to animal shelters, facing euthanasia. We rescue these dogs and offer them a satisfying career in conservation research.
You need the right job. Follow your bliss, as they say.
It’s interesting to me that dogs have probably always helped people … from the earliest days of dog domestication. And as our lives on Earth have changed, the way dogs help has changed, too.
Yay dogs!
One of the detection dogs - Mocha - looks like my dog, Snoop.
Dogs are amazing animals with a boundless spirit. It doesn’t surprise me that they can smell through water. My black lab, ZuZu, chases rocks I throw into a creek and comes back with the same rock every time. My only explanation is that she smells my scent on the rock even while it rests 2-3 feet under water. It continues to amaze me.
Thanks to this group for saving these dogs.
That’s a reasonable explanation about the rock, Shannon! If the dogs Eleanor described in this post can smell whale scat under water, ZuZu can probably catch your scent underwater, too.