Transcriber: Ilze Garda Reviewer: Denise RQ
Thank you so much.
It's an honor to be here among this amazing event and these people.
Wolves evolved into dogs,
and humans have lived with them for maybe as long as 15, 000 years.
We have changed their physiology and their behavior
into this incredible variety of breeds that you see today,
all stemming from wolves.
We have benefited also, and we have been changed by dogs
during that evolutionary time.
People who live with dogs live longer, healthier, and happier lives
than people who don't have dogs.
And we've changed our own selves to interact with dogs;
they've changed their whole evolutionary history
to adapt to humans.
They can understand human gestures,
tone of voice and even our intent to communicate with them
better than any other species,
even our closest living relatives, chimpanzees and bonobos,
who apparently couldn't really care less.
(Laughter)
I've always been interested in how canines communicate,
which led me to Africa for my PhD work on African wild dogs.
These are huge, ranging, endangered species
who don't bark or howl,
and I was interested in how they communicate
with the chemicals in their urine and feces across a huge landscape,
which their compatriots then smell to get information.
So, yes, you can just get a PhD by picking up dog poop.
(Laughter)
Anyway, I wanted to understand this language of olfaction,
and help decipher it to help conserve them.
We spent tens of thousands of dollars on radio collars, and they often failed,
so we darted and handled dogs far more than we wanted.
We also had to maintain and fly an airplane a couple of times a week.
Besides being really expensive and making us worry
about what kind of impacts we had on the dogs,
we probably should have been worried a little bit more about ourselves;
and the giraffe,
as this is how one of our flights began and ended.
It did give me time, though,
to reflect a little bit on why we always reach
for the most expensive, most invasive, high-tech solution to getting information.
So I went back to explore
a highly-evolved, but low-tech data gathering system.
We have used dogs to hunt with and to gather our game and livestock.
For eons they've been right under our noses.
Only recently, we started to ask what's under their noses.
It was only in the 1960s
that someone first trained a dog to detect a specific scent,
and the field of detection dogs was born.
It was in 1984, that the first beagle was taken to an airport
to look for illegal agricultural products.
Their best tool for bombs, and narcotics, and cannabis
- a wealth of things that I'll talk a little bit more about later -
but why are they so good at finding things?
It's the nose.
These guys have an incredible chemical sensory system
on the front of their bodies
that leads them to the environment,
sampling molecules that float up off just about everything.
And they have an ability that we can barely understand,
because we don't have the ability to understand it.
But there are some comparisons that are useful.
Humans have about 5 million olfactory receptor cells,
and dogs have about 220 million.
It's also their brain:
60% of which is dedicated to olfaction, while only about 12% of ours is.
If you or I were walking down the street,
we might smell baking bread a few doors down,
and we'll be smelling in parts per hundred.
A dog might smell that same loaf of bread baking from over a kilometer away,
and be able to discriminate strains of yeast used in that bread,
and smell it in parts per trillion.
So a few of us gathered in 1990s
to figure out how to ask dogs conservation questions.
We started to train them and develop new methods
for fielding and taking these dogs out
into the places that we needed to ask these questions.
We trained them on things
that are nearly impossible for humans to find in the real world,
like a sub-species of a tiny plant, a tiny bit of old poop,
or maybe a snare wire.
And this is what they work for, a toy.
We select most of our dogs from shelters, and we pick the craziest ones,
the toy-obsessed, high-drive, high-energy dogs
that don't make good pets.
But they are the right kind of crazy.
(Laughter)
And I've got the greatest job in the world, I get to walk my dog.
We get to walk our dogs in these huge, complex ecosystems.
What it boils down to
is we work in big places looking for very tiny things.
Our dogs consistently lead us huge distances to find these tiny samples,
from which we can then extract DNA, hormones, disease information, or diet
to understand a population of animals without ever even having to see them.
These are a few of the places that we've worked around the world,
and the species that our dogs have worked on.
From carnivores in the Rockies
to plants, invasive and native plants, across the West,
tigers in Russia, moon bears in China, snow leopards in Mongolia,
invasive snakes in Guam;
we really haven't asked a question that they can't help us answer.
All of these projects were stymied
by a lack of information that our dogs then provided.
In few of the projects that we've worked on recently,
last year, we were in Zambia finding out how many cheetahs
used the national park and the areas outside of it.
The dogs had to learn that cheetahs poop in trees, and they had to work
at over 100 degrees [Fahrenheit], which is why he is wearing a cooling coat.
This is a Cross River gorilla, rarest of all the great apes
and found only in the highlands along the Cameroon-Nigerian border.
They're a complete mystery to researchers who need to know how many are left;
there is certainty fewer than 250.
So we were flown over from Montana
to look for dung to get disease and genetic information,
which is particularly important
because these guys carry disease that affect humans and vice versa.
It was an incredibly challenging climate and terrain for us,
but the dogs thrived.
They hit the ground running and found dung
from huge distances in the tropical Forrest,
and we got all this new viral information about this species of gorilla.
And who knew that snails had enough scent for dogs to find,
especially buried in leaf litter in Hawaii?
But this is Wicket on a wolf snail, and she was able to let them know
how invasive this snail is in killing the native land snails there.
This is Camas alerting on Kincaid's lupine in the Willamette Valley.
To us, every lupine look the same there,
- all six species -
but fortunately, Camas could tell the difference,
and it makes a difference for the endangered Fender's blue butterfly
which is entirely dependent on Kincaid's lupine for its entire life.
So dogs are telling us incredible things for conservation,
but lots of other people are asking questions of dogs that save lives,
like diabetes dogs that are telling their owners
whether their blood sugar is too high or dangerously low,
they are able to predict epileptic seizures,
they are even able to smell bacteria that is now invading hospitals.
This is a picture of Daisy, who is working on a woman's breast sample,
able to tell her whether she has one of five different kinds of cancer.
And she's able to do this
more accurately and earlier than any other diagnostic technique.
When we began this work,
I had no idea where it would lead us and where the dogs would lead us.
We ended up going to Cameroon, and stopping off at a school for the deaf,
where these kids had only seen dogs as pariahs.
So we stopped and talked about conservation and what dogs can do,
and by the end of the talk, these kids were willing to touch a dog,
out of a lot of fear,
and they touched a dog for the first time with kindness.
As we drove away, we saw one kid balling up a little bit of garbage
and throwing it towards a village dog, but not to chase it away, to play with it.
So dogs change us, and I'd say for the better.
I'd like to introduce Pete Coppolillo who's our executive director,
but, more importantly, my dog Pepin who will show you what he does.
PC: Well done! MP: Alright, buddy!
PC: While Megan and Pepin get ready,
we'll take a look at this process
in a condensed, but real world way.
As the best goes on,
that's Pepin's signal that it's time to go to work,
and you'll see his behavior change.
When Meg and Pepin start their transact together,
his body language is loose, and his noise is up and down,
he's just trying to catch that first scent.
Then, as soon as he gets it, you'll see his body tighten up,
and his nose may go down, he may change directions,
- just like there, his nose goes down -
and he'll go straight over.
He may zig and zag in the scent cone, as he comes near to the target,
but then, when he finds it, he alerts just like that,
and that's called the passive alert.
One of you has a little ball of cheetah poop under your seat
(Laughter)
but don't worry, you know who you are.
(Laughter)
And Pepin doesn't know who you are,
and he's going to start and find it now.
MP: This way!
PC: Megan calls herself the toy delivery system
because that's his reward,
and a lot of other people call Megan and our other scientists dog whisperers.
In fact, they're really dog listeners,
because if you watch this process right now,
there's a tremendous amount
of very subtle communication going on with body language,
both Meg reading Pepin's body language, but also Pepin reading hers,
so it goes both ways.
MP: He's got scent.
PC: Pepin is used to working in big landscapes outside,
and often there is wind taking it, so when it's not moving,
it may be a little harder to zero in on what it is and where it is.
There he goes.
And here comes his paycheck, a tug.
Well done, Pepin!
MP: Good boy!
(Applause)
PC: Thank you.
(Applause)