Dogs, plants and conservation

“You have my dream job,” I told Lauralea Oliver, owner of K9inscentive, “what could be better than working with dogs, plants and conservation!”

Lauralea and many like her, have trained dogs to do conservation work by sniffing out all kinds of things from dangerous chemicals such as PCB, to finding rare animals such as the spotted owl, to locating endangered plants, nearly hidden by the surrounding vegetation.

Scientists usually have a vague idea of where a particular plant grows – or used to grow – but this may be only a couple of very small plants in acres of woods or fields. It takes a lot of time and effort to locate them. Dogs, whose olfactory skills are 10,000 to 100,000 times better than that of the scientists’ can be trained to find these plants quickly and effectively.

For example, the Desert Botanical Garden, in conjunction with U.S. Fish and Wildlife and the Smithsonian Institute, have used Lauralea Oliver and her dogs to find rare and endangered orchids in Southern Arizona. She trained the dogs using a species closely related to the orchid.

Using dogs to do conservation work was the brainchild of Samuel Wasser, a research biologist at the University of Washington. In 1997, he founded Conservation Canines, part of the Center for Conservation Biology at UW and adopted narcotic dog training methods to train dogs to find wildlife and plants.

The results have been stunning. Not only can the dogs find rare plants, they are also invaluable in the early detection of potentially destructive invasive plants. They can be trained to distinguish different species within the same genus, allowing field biologists to remove nonnative species while leaving the native species intact.

One of the most impressive dog detection stories is not about plants but whales. A Smithsonian Magazine article from 2016 is about dogs trained to find feces from the Right Whale. Whale poop (apparently bright orange) sinks within 30 minutes so scientists have had limited success in actually collecting the scat. A dog, however, can smell the feces from a mile away and guide his handlers to it quickly. Before using dogs, scientists found on an average, 10 scat samples per year. With the dogs? an impressive 150 samples. The feces provides scientists with information about the diet, behavior and health of the whales without disturbing the animals themselves.

As much as I love my own Sadie, I’m well aware that she doesn’t have the personality of a detection dog. She’s much too calm and well balanced. A good detection dog is hyperactive and insanely focused. They will do anything, anything to chase a ball. A story is told of a detection dog who sat looking at a ball on top of the refrigerator – until his owner returned nine hours later. So, even though I love the thought of training my dog as a conservation canine, I know she would just rather lie around the yard chewing on sticks.

Even though I said training conservation dogs would be my dream job, it’s really not. THIS is my dream job, writing about and painting the beauty of our rare and endangered plants. That is a job to dream of!