From the emerald ash borer to zebra mussels, Oregon is no stranger to invasive species. The state has a management plan in place that aims to detect invasive species early on, educate the public and prevent their entry into Oregon to begin with. But there are other tools that government agencies and researchers use around the world: dogs.
Conservation dogs are trained canines that help locate invasive and endangered species, as well as playing a role in data collection for research. Jennifer Hartman and Heath Smith are co-founders of Rogue Detection Dogs. They both join us to share more on what makes a good conservation dog and how they got into this work to begin with.
Note: The following transcript was transcribed digitally and validated for accuracy, readability and formatting by an OPB volunteer.
Dave Miller: From the Gert Boyle Studio at OPB, this is Think Out Loud. I’m Dave Miller. We turn now to the amazing world of dog noses. For years now, specially trained conservation dogs have been used to help locate invasive and endangered species, and to help researchers collect ecological data. Dogs have been brought all around the world to sniff out scat, weeds, bugs and nests.
Heath Smith and Jennifer Hartman join us now to talk about this. They are the co-founders of Rogue Detection Teams based in Northeastern Washington. It’s great to have you both on Think Out Loud.
Jennifer Hartman: Hi, we’re so excited to be here.
Miller: Heath, you started a little bit earlier. You’ve been doing this for 25 years now. How did you start?
Heath Smith: Oh, that’s such a long time ago now. I was a wildlife tech and worked on a number of megafauna projects, did the really cool stuff for folks. And there was a job announcement for an orienteer on a grizzly bear project in Alberta, in Jasper National Park. I thought that was really cool. So I showed up. I would be reading the map for a dog team and collecting samples that they found. Turned out that myself and the dog were meant for each other and that kind of turned my life around. After that, I worked with dogs for the next 25 years.
Miller: When you say it turned out that you and the dog were meant for each other, what do you mean?
Smith: I didn’t have dogs growing up. I was actually a cat person. I wasn’t looking to adopt a dog. I had a very kind of nomadic lifestyle, going from different wildlife study to wildlife study. I never thought about having a dog. But I showed up and this little cattle dog named Gator needed someone to take care of him. He ended up moving into my truck with me and we ended up becoming partners on that project later in the season.
He changed how I looked at wildlife work. I had this connection with him that I think I’d kinda hoped to have with animals that were being trapped and collared. But he showed me so much more about the outdoors and signs left by these animals. And then we didn’t have to trap, tag and tattoo, or pull teeth, or do anything to the animals. We still got an amazing amount of data.
Miller: Jennifer, can you give us a sense for the range of things or creatures that you can train dogs to find?
Hartman: I think, honestly, we’re just scratching the surface. Even though this field’s been around for a while now, I think people are still surprised to learn about it. So we’re not even getting all the information we could get. But currently, dogs around the world are being used to find everything, as you mentioned, from scat … There’s a lot in scat that we can learn about wildlife. We can do invasive plants to native plants. We can do wildlife mortalities. So we work a lot at wind energy facilities, where we’re looking for impacts on birds and bats.
We’ve done owl pellets, turtle nests such as sea turtles and freshwater turtles. We’ve done pollinators. So bumblebee nests, and tiny little larvae of endangered caterpillars that are tinier than a grain of rice. And we’ve done viruses and plants and toxins in the environment. So really, any odor in the wild is potentially an odor that we can help find.
Miller: I gotta say I’m loving the birds in the background. Are you both outside right now?
Hartman: [Laughter] We are. We’re on a project actually in Oregon looking for a threatened Humboldt marten, and we’re at a campground where we had Wi-Fi. So yes, the birds are part of this.
Miller: It sounds great. It sounds so nice. It seems like we’re faking it, but it’s real.
Heath, how do you train a dog to search for any number of those things that Jennifer was just mentioning?
Smith: That’s a really good question. I’m gonna kind of turn that on its head for a minute. We actually don’t use the word “train” anymore. We’re not dog trainers and we don’t really consider ourselves dog handlers. This is something that’s kind of built for us over 25 years. But we started to realize more and more that these dogs we work with are our partners. They’re our equals in the field. Sometimes I see some good habitat that I want to check out and I’ll let my partner know, “Hey, let’s go check this out.” Sometimes they’re saying, “Hey, no dummy, look over here, I found something.” We all have our specialties in the field. Theirs is their nose, which we really value.
But as biologists we also have a lot of knowledge about the ecology, reading the wind, where in the habitat we need to go. So they do listen to us occasionally as well. And we refer to it as teaching rather than training, because we’re not trying to program them to do a certain thing. We actually listen to them while we’re going through these steps of teaching them an odor. But it’s actually quite straightforward. The dogs that we select are generally rescue dogs from different rescues or sanctuaries or shelters that have been returned a number of times due to having a lot of energy basically.
We select these dogs, often, through their desire to want to play. Maybe that’s fetch, maybe it’s tug. It could be just playing with us. But then we match that with the odor we’re looking for. So for example, we could set a marten scat out, the dog goes over to sniff it because it’s stinky, like a poop. We drop the ball and then we start playing with them. They quickly associate that odor with this reward of play. We move that stinky poop to another spot. They go back to where it was the first time and they’re like, oh, it’s not here anymore. And we’re like, where’d it go? They run around looking for it, they find it, we drop the ball and then they play.
It doesn’t take very long for them to understand, OK, every time I find this, we get to play. I love this. I want to do it more and more. So it’s very quick. Teaching people that want to come and do this work with the dogs is much more difficult. So the dogs could take anywhere between 30 minutes to a couple of weeks [to teach]. For a person, it takes about two years to really get a good grasp on how this works.
Miller: You mentioned martens because that’s what you’re looking for right now. Does marten scat smell different enough to dogs than fisher scat or mink? These are all in the same weasel family, but they all might be pooping in the woods somewhere. Can your dogs tell the difference?
Smith: Yes. In fact, we’ve actually worked with the dogs where they distinguished individuals for us. They can also distinguish male from female. Now, that comes with a bit of a caveat. When you’re actually out in the woods and you’re searching for these things, when you’re looking for marten and you come across a fisher sample, in a lot of cases, you’re probably still gonna want to collect that for the information that’s out there. Could the dog actually ignore that fisher sample and only show you marten? Yes, they can do that.
Miller: Where have you worked with the dogs that you are partnering with?
Hartman: This work takes us around the world. So we’re currently in Oregon now, but we’ve worked in Africa, Nepal, Bhutan, Spain, across North America – lots of projects in Canada and in the United States – Mexico, Brazil … So we’ve worked in many places, and our dogs have lots of stamps in their passports.
Miller: Jennifer, Heath was saying that the teaching component for one of these animals [is] on the order of weeks. There was a fantastic OPB “Oregon Field Guide” story video about you and there’s a link to it on our website. That’s where you mentioned that the name you’ve given for the humans, as you call them, [is] bounders. And Heath had said that it can take years to train the humans up to do this. So what are the challenges for humans?
Hartman: As you can imagine, our work takes us to some really wild, remote and rugged places. I think when people think about partnering with dogs, working in nature and doing conservation, it sounds very dreamy and idealistic. But we live out of our cars most of the year. There’s not hotels, conveniently, in the habitat that we have to survey for. And we try to think about conservation funds and resources. So we’re camping for weeks at a time. There may not be showers or facilities available nearby. We try to have a minimal impact, so we’re just traveling light. Then we have to travel to different projects, so we could be away from home for weeks at a time.
All of this is just part of then learning how to communicate and partner with a high-drive detection dog. It’s very different skills, so it’s a very specific person who would do well and thrive in this work. You’re not looking at seeing your family or friends for a really long time and that can feel isolating. Also, we’re faced with some really challenging questions that we’re asking about wildlife, and it can be sad at times, to be honest. So we look to our dogs to be more than just our field partners, but also just our emotional support out there.
So it’s a tough job. It’s not easy, not for the faint of heart, and takes a lot of grit.
Miller: Heath, what have you learned from your dogs over the years?
Smith: [Laughter] Oh, I could go on for a long time. Mostly, to sum it up: Patience, compassion, and to have fun. That’s one of the things we always share with our teams in the field. It is hard work. You may feel like you’re not finding enough samples. You might feel like you don’t know what you’re doing anymore or you can’t tell a marten from a fisher poop. And the thing to always fall back on is to have fun out there. Because that’s what the dogs really feed off of is fun. The more fun you have and the more you kind of let go of all the expectations, the better the two of you will do in the field.
Miller: Jennifer, what about you? What do you feel like you’ve learned from your dog partners?
Hartman: So much, but I would say mostly empathy and love. They’ve shown me a world I didn’t know was possible. I always grew up reading books about people and their relationships with animals and especially dogs. I was like, “oh, that sounds so amazing, I wish I could know what that felt like.” But you never think it’s really possible for you. But then you meet these dogs and they let you into this world, and they’re just so gentle about it. I think that I’ve learned to be more human, almost, from the relationships we developed with the dogs.
Miller: Jennifer and Heath, thanks so much for joining us.
Hartman: Thank you.
Smith: It’s our pleasure.
Miller: Jennifer Hartman and Heath Smith are the co-founders of Rogue Detection Teams.
“Think Out Loud®” broadcasts live at noon every day and rebroadcasts at 8 p.m.
If you’d like to comment on any of the topics in this show or suggest a topic of your own, please get in touch with us on Facebook, send an email to thinkoutloud@opb.org, or you can leave a voicemail for us at 503-293-1983.
