Info Feature: Canine Conservationists

Condensed from an article titled “Field Work” by Ilona Popper, which appeared in the 11/09-01/10 issue of The Bark magazine.

There are a handful of dogs in the United States who work for science through Working Dogs for Conservation. The dogs scan wild terrain to find wildlife scat (feces), hair, plants, and even animals. The organization was founded by four biologists — Alice Whitelaw, Aimee Hurt, Megan Parker and Deborah Smith — to provide scientists with a noninvasive, inexpensive but accurate way to count or study wildlife and plants.

"Capture and handling" is still considered to be one of the best ways to study and observe wildlife. Biologists set traps in the woods or dart wildlife from helicopters. Sometimes they drug and fit the animals with radio collars, then use receivers to locate the animals later and observe or count them. Yet, capture and handling can be costly and difficult. Animals may detect traps and bypass them or, Iike wolves, dig them up and poop on them (gotcha!). Some animals fight the trap, expending terrific energy or injuring themselves. Wildlife in traps may hyperventilate, overheat or, very rarely, die of "capture myopathy" (heart failure from stress). They can also fall prey to other animals.

About 15 years ago, there was a shift in the wildlife field. Researchers figured out ways to collect and decode DNA from scat, hair or skin samples. "What if we could get information from scat without ever seeing the animal? We started thinking about using dogs. It seemed natural," says Whitelaw. Whitelaw and her partners teamed up with trainers of narcotic-detection dogs. Together, they developed a protocol for training conservation dogs to help wildlife biologists do their jobs. Working Dogs for Conservation is one of only three organizations in the country that uses dogs for conservation detection.

It's a rare dog who doesn't love to sniff out, evaluate, roll in or coolly sprinkle over poop. There's a difference, however, between a pet dog's daily rounds and the focused work of a detection dog, who communicates with her handler about every single scat of the "target" species. Only a very special dog can be taught not to treat poop like poop, and out of every 300 dogs tested, only one of those even looks like a candidate, and of those, 60% fail. A dog must have the drive to get through repetitive and sometimes grueling training and searches, and must be able to ignore distractions and the brain messages that occur once the target is found. But even an experienced tracker can balk when scat carries a territorial warning, such as an alpha male wolf can leave. The handler has to know how to read the individual dog in order to work him at his peak. Every dog is different.

Each conservation tracking dog lives with its handler, like police dogs do. Training begins with games of hide-and-seek, in which jars of some smelly substance are hidden within the hole of a cinder block, which is in a row of blocks. When the dog finds the scent, the reward (toy & play) follows. Once the dog makes the link easily, a formal alert is taught. In the end, though, training alone doesn’t make a conservation detection dog. The dogs must have a "willingness to cooperate," says Whitelaw. "No amount of training’s going to make a dog do something like this."

More information can be found at www.workingdogsforconservation.org

Random Thought

"What lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us." — Ralph Waldo Emerson

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