The Dog Blog with Kathryn Socie
Unemployed Border collie finds New Opportunity in Emerging Green Industry
By Kathryn Socie, 4-28-09
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| Orbee getting a reward for a successful find during a training exercise. Photo Credit: Pam Voth | |
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If you haven’t been to the Humane Society of Beaverhead County in Dillon, Mont. lately you may not be familiar with the glut of out-of-work border collies, Australian shepherds, heelers and various mixes therein. These unfortunate souls are not only looking for homes, but are in dire need of jobs to boot. Unlike their Labrador counterparts, thrilled with the mere opportunity to laze around couch-side, burning kibble, these high energy, task oriented pups require a sense of purpose; a physical and mental challenge, making them feel useful, indispensible even. Jobs herding cattle aren’t as easy to come by these days, so figuring out ways to branch out into new arenas is the only means by which many of these extremely driven dogs are going stay employed. At least one, recently, found a spot among a unique cadre of dogs, working to save wildlife and wild places in a new green sector for the employable four-legged.
Aimee Hurt, co-founder of Working Dogs for Conservation (WDC), a Montana-based non-profit, spent months scouring shelters in search of the right dog; the right mix of off-the-charts energy and drive with a good work ethic, which is not as easy as you may think to come by. That is, until the Dillon shelter called to say that a stray border collie with a particularly acute toy obsession had recently arrived. He passed the initial screening and Hurt took him on for further training and evaluation where she quickly discovered the dog had just the right skills to make a career change.
Somewhere between the initial phone call and his official job offer, this dog came to stay with me. Hired to raise money and muse (well, write and produce outreach materials) for WDC, given my years of dogged experience, it seemed fitting to throw some dog work my way. My job with this dog was to continue his training, up it a bit and evaluate him in general—find out more about his generic quirks. Despite my level of experience and specifically with cattle dogs no less, this Border collie, named Orbee in gratitude to Planet Dog Foundation who made his rescue possible, was an entirely new dog experience for me.
Orbee is smart, arguably smarter than I am with an agenda all his own and an un-canny ability to suck-up at just the right moment. Half the time I would head out to work him, I would quickly realize that I was the one, in fact, being worked. If I took him to an area to train and returned to that area totally inadvertently on a random hike, say 10 days later, his nose would hit the ground and he would promptly begin “the game,” totally certain he was now doing that sniff-and-find thing I had asked him to do many times over. Clearly he knew where he was, which left me stunned, floored really.
Somehow this particular piece of real estate summoned his inner workaholic. Astounding.
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Comments
"his nose would hit the ground and he would promptly begin “the game,” totally certain he was now doing that sniff-and-find thing"
Just like when my dog goes to my mom's house and tries to figure out if the cooked liver for her is in the fridge, dish or basement dish.
Read more here:
Increasing concern about the status of rare species and endangered wildlife populations has spurred the development of non-invasive methods for wildlife censusing, monitoring and research. Examples of non-invasive sampling methods include photographic traps, hair snag stations, and fecal (scat) collection. In particular, scat samples can provide a wealth of information such as a species’ presence, relative abundance, food habits, parasite loads, habitat use and home range size. Furthermore, analyses of endocrine extracted from scats can determine the sex and reproductive status of individuals, and analyses of the DNA contained in scat can verify species and sex, and potentially determine population size, home range, paternity, and kinship.
Use of non-invasive approaches to obtain critical data requires that wildlife or sign (e.g. scat, urine, hair, dens) be easily located, a difficult task in rugged terrain and among animals with extensive home ranges. To reduce the difficulty, WDC handlers have trained working dogs to differentiate and locate by scent target species or their sign. The denning, hibernation, or burrowing traits of some species make them excellent candidates for location by canine olfaction. Over the past decades, dogs have been successfully trained to detect a variety of wildlife species (e.g. seals, foxes, turtles, snakes, birds, black-footed ferrets, termites, bears). In the future, WDC aims to expand the use of detection dogs in wildlife research quantifying detection and discrimination performance in a scientifically rigorous manner.
Working together, WDC’s canine handlers and detection dogs have located target wildlife or their sign for research and conservation projects. WDC has participated in the design and implementation of various projects, trained canine-handlers, performed data analysis, and prepared presentations, reports, and manuscripts for publication. Furthermore, samples collected by WDC teams have been used for forensic and disease investigations, monitoring, mark recapture estimates, and physiological analyses.
Researchers and environmentalists are experimenting with a new method for collecting biological samples in the wild. They're using trained tracking dogs to sniff out everything from rare plants to moose pellets.
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