if someone goes out and uses a firearm to illegally poach an animal there's a spent casing
which can be evidence we had benny search for those casings in some very tall grass when he
finds a casing he'll lay down with the casing between his two front paws and he'll basically put
his nose right on it dogs are an effective tool at finding wildlife because of their incredible sense
of smell and their incredible natural hunting behavior they can basically see the unseen for us
wildlife trafficking is happening everywhere where somebody thinks
that they can make some sort of profit off of wildlife or natural resources
many people automatically assume it's a problem in africa it's a problem in asia especially
those of us in north america we automatically think it's not our problem
wildlife trafficking is happening all over the world there's definitely the concern with wildlife
trafficking pushing these species to the brink of extinction but there's a much bigger picture to it
that people don't often think about when you think of it on a larger scale it's often tied to other
crimes trafficking and weapons trafficking in humans so a lot of this is tied together
a dog is able to smell a teaspoon of sugar dissolved into the amount of water that would
fill two olympic swimming pools so that's kind of the level of specificity that they're able to get
down to which is just absolutely incredible and when you compare dogs to human searchers they're
consistently faster they cover more ground and they're often more accurate what makes dogs so
exceptional at this job is their olfactory ability and their ability to hunt out those
odors and the ability for us to work with them they're very trainable they want to do a good job
they want the reward and so we use the reward to help show them what we want them to find
so you can see that he very much loves and wants his ball
we are at the working dogs for conservation world headquarters it's 45-ish acres just outside
of missoula montana we're the world's foremost conservation detection dog organization so what
we do is we take primarily rescue dogs we look for absolutely ball crazy high-energy confident
rescue dogs that need a job needs something to do and then we train them and then we put them
to work protecting wildlife and wild places by searching for endangered species invasive species
and things related to wildlife crime we have a whole bunch of different scents that the dogs have
been trained to do so that ranges everything from spotted cat skins so a lot of our dogs
in africa that's a pretty common contraband item ivory rhino horn shark fin ammo and guns
i was in wildlife law enforcement for 11 years the past three of those years was as
a detective with washington department of fish and wildlife police and as part of that i had k9 benny
i found him when he was right around one and a half he was evaluated as a working dog
he passed the initial evaluation then we went through a few months of training he
did very well with that and about a year or so ago we made the transition to working dogs
for conservation and since then benny is being trained on more conservation related
target odors my dog barley is a six and a half year old border collie he is in the process of
learning both shark fin and ivory when i'm training barley we're generally working with
buckets or pvc pipes so that there's a lot of different containers that have different
things in them and he learns that what he's supposed to do is tell me about a given scent
one of the really cool things about using detection dogs is that you can use them at
multiple stages along the pipeline of wildlife crime so dogs are able to search vehicles as the
vehicles are coming into the park where they might find ammunition or guns that let us know that
those people were not coming into the park for the right reasons they also are able to in some
cases track the animals and actually make sure the animals are healthy we've had dogs that are
trained to track specific animals so a specific rhino and make sure that rhino is doing well
then if there is a poaching event that occurs we can use the dogs to track backwards and hopefully
make an arrest before that contraband ever makes it to market the dogs can also be used
to intercept contraband in the example of searching a vehicle or searching a shipping
container and intercepting that ivory or shark fin before it's ever actually able to be sold
my previous job before this was working with dogs that were deemed unadoptable at shelters due to
behavior issues working with these high energy ball crazy high drive dogs is where shelters
really struggle the most we're not just giving these dogs a home we're not just rescuing them
we're actually able to put exactly what made them a bad pet and put that to use
protecting other wildlife wild places it's so special and it's wait it's what really gets me
excited to come to this job every day the work we do at wd4c has multiple impacts saving and
protecting natural resources and helping and wildlife crime there's also the impact of us
giving dogs second chances going into shelters and finding dogs that need
jobs and need new homes and need a purpose and we're able to do both of those
things
you