Our Story

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, Working Dogs for Conservation (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 decade, WDC dogs have been trained to detect a variety of wildlife scat (such as black bear, grizzly bear, wolf, cougar, kit fox and fisher), live wildlife (wolf snails, black-footed ferrets, brown tree snakes and desert tortoises) and plants (Kincaid’s lupine, spotted knapweed and dyer’s woad).  WDC aims to expand the use of conservation dogs in wildlife research and is always seeking new applications and partnerships with researchers, managers and conservation organizations.

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, genetic analyses and physiological analyses.