Our Story

Working Dogs for Conservation has three primary aims: monitoring endangered wildlife, defining wildlife corridors and helping eradicate damaging invasive species; all while ensuring rich and rewarding lives for our canine partners.

An overall decline in populations of rare and threatened species worldwide has generated the development of non-invasive wildlife surveying methods. These include: camera traps, hair snag stations, and the collection of fecal (scat) samples. Of these, scat samples offer a particular wealth of information about a species’ presence, relative abundance, food habits, parasite loads, habitat use and home range size. The hormones and DNA extracted from scats can provide insight on the sex and reproductive status of individuals, which in turn can be used to determine population size, home range, paternity, and kinship, information that is critical to the success of management and conservation initiatives.

It can be as daunting a task to locate the signs of elusive wildlife species (e.g. scat, urine, hair, dens) as it is to locate the animals themselves. This is especially the case in rugged terrain and with species that are nocturnal, cryptic, wide ranging or rare. In some cases, contact with people can pose a risk to the species under consideration. WDC places a high value on scientific integrity and has the best interests of wildlife species very much at heart. We maximize the efficiency of our searches, ensure the data collected is of the highest quality, and minimize contact with the animals themselves by pairing handlers, who are also biologists, with detection dogs specially trained to differentiate and locate the scat of target species. Our dog / handler teams are able to cover large areas without disturbing wildlife, livestock or domestic animals and without luring animals or changing their behavior, which can influence study results.

Over the past decade, our dogs have been trained to detect a variety of wildlife scat (ranging from grizzly, black and moon bear, wolf, cougar, kit fox, blunt-nosed leopard lizard to moose, wolverine and fisher), live wildlife (wolf snails, black-footed ferrets, brown tree snakes and desert tortoises). Our dogs have also been trained to rare and invasive plants (Kincaid’s lupine, spotted knapweed, Chinese bush clover and dyer’s woad) and have been part of a number of plant conservation and weed eradication programs.

WDC has taken a leading role in helping to expand the use of conservation dogs in wildlife and conservation research. We are always seeking new applications and partnerships with researchers, managers and conservation organizations worldwide.