Wildlife detection dogs

I listened to an episode of the podcast Ologies on Eco-odorology or science sniffing dogs, and became interested in learning more. They do touch on some of this in the podcast as well if you’re interested in this topic.

I was curious about the actual success compared to other methods and the breeds used. The guest on the podcast uses all rescue dogs, which I think is awesome. But what breeds are others using and does it differ around the world?

To answer my questions, I found a review article by Grimm-Seyfarth and colleagues (2021) that looked at more than 1200 publications, with just over 900 being scientific publications. North America, Europe, and Oceania, which includes Australia, Fiji, New Zealand, Solomon Islands, and other countries in the area, use wildlife detection dogs the most but use is increasing worldwide.

There are reports of the dogs since 1930, in a total of 62 countries. They have been used to detect 408 animal, 42 plant, 26 fungi, and six bacteria species. 128 different breeds have been used. Some countries show preferences for certain breeds but generally no breed stands out as being better or worse.

The authors mention that different dogs and breeds may need different training times. This was something they spoke about in the podcast of what they look for when choosing a dog to train. One of the big factors is persistence: if you throw a toy into tall grass will the dog keep looking for it even if it takes a bit to find it.

So how do the dogs perform? They outperform other methods 88.71% of the time and are only outperformed less than 1% of the time. The authors don’t say what the alternative methods are.

What are the dogs detecting? The majority are detecting living species. But other options include scat and other secretions, dead individuals, nests,  feathers, eggs, or spores.