Endangered Species Helped by Dogs

Dogs are using their powerful sense of smell to help in the fight to save endangered species.

Researchers at Auburn University in Alabama began using specially trained dogs a couple of years ago to sniff out scat (feces) left behind by black bears, weasels, skunks, and other wild creatures. Alabama is home to 117 endangered species.

Todd Steury, and assistant professor of wildlife ecology and founder of EcoDog, originally used the dogs to find out where certain carnivores were living in order to better protect those areas.

He believes that habitat loss is one of the biggest drivers of biodiversity loss today. He says that dogs are ideal for this type of work because more traditional tools that use bait might skew results by luring animals into an area they would not normally go.

Scat provides researchers with a wealth of information such as population size, fertility, diet, and stress levels.

Currently 11 Labrador Retrievers are part of the program and were all trained at the university's Canine Detection and Research Institute, one of the largest dog detection training programs outside of the federal government.

Training takes about eight weeks for the first scent,then about 10 minutes for additional odors.

The dogs can be "rented" for field studies in other states, and recently worked on finding invasive pythons deep in the Florida Everglades and right whale feces floating in the Atlantic Ocean.

Nose Game for Dogs

Yesterday's blog I shared a mind game for dogs.

Here is the nose game!


Watch this short video that encourages dogs to problem solve using their sense of smell. An easy game for you to try at home.

Entertainment for all!

The Nose Knows

The first thing your dog does when you walk in the door is sniff your legs. Dogs gather a lot of information from a quick sniff of their environment – both physical and emotional details. He smells where you've been and even how the experience affected you. Dogs sniff each other and each others' secretions constantly, monitoring various physiological and emotional changes on an ongoing basis.

Dogs live in a world of odors. Their sense of smell is their most refined sense; in fact, it is so refined a bloodhound can identify scales of skin shed by humans three days previously.

They can also detect drugs in hidden in body cavities, can sniff out rats, termites, bombs, missing persons, bodies drowned or buried in snow or rubble, and even the presence of melanoma cancer. Their noses are about as sensitive as our eyes.

The Facts:

The scrolled, scent membrane inside a dog's nose is about four times greater in area than the equivalent smell organ in humans. In the dog's nose, there are over 200 million scent receptors in the nasal folds compared to our 5 million.

Moisture on the nose helps to capture scent and transmit it onto odor-sensitive nasal membranes, which cover the nose's wafer-thin turbinate bones. These bones comprise of convoluted folds, ensuring that the tiniest amount of scent is captured within them.

Next time you take your dog for a walk, watch his/her nose at work.

Dogs Incrediable Sense of Smell

Yes, dogs can smell cancer as well as low blood sugar.

The Pine Street Foundation, a cancer-education and research center in San Anselmo, California, published a study showing it was possible to train dogs to identify, based on breath samples, which patients had lung and breast cancer. Now the organization is recruiting ovarian cancer patients and dogs for a new study.

In diabetics, the presence of ketones—substances made by the body during the metabolic process—can be smelled in urine and on the breath when blood sugars are high. Dogs can pick up on other smells that humans can’t when glucose levels drop.

Pretty amazing, wouldn't you agree?