For millennia dogs have been helpers to humans: they have herded and protected livestock, pulled sleds, hunted game, led the blind, located people after disasters, and sniffed out drugs. Now a new occupation can be added: conservation aide.
Working Dogs for Conservation (WDC) was co-founded by Megan Parker in 2000: the idea, to use dogs' impeccable scent capabilities for conservation initiatives, appears so logical and useful when Parker talks about it, one is surprised it took environmentalists so long to realize the potential of dogs.
"Our mission is to benefit science and conservation by working with detection dogs. We help save wildlife by supporting conservation efforts to gather information on rare species in an accurate and non-invasive way," explains Parker. "We train dogs to detect rare samples and they excel at finding trained target odors from endangered species scats to invasive weeds on a huge landscape."
Megan Parker and her dog Pepin taking a break. Photo courtesy of Working Dogs for Conservation,.
WDC has worked on a wide variety of projects across all regions of the United States. For example, they worked with the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) on The Carnivore Connectivity Project where the dogs located scats of wolves, cougars, black and grizlly bears along the Idaho-Montana border.
"Thanks to our team of dogs, we’re proud to report that this work led to the protection of critical wildlife corridors by closing more than 40 miles of roads and preventing a development in a sensitive area," says Parker.
The group has also helped survey the comeback of moose in the Adirondacks and located threatened plants in Oregon and invasive snails in Hawaii, among many other projects.
Parker says for each of these projects the dog's nose is key: "canids have evolved as amazing scenting machines. Their noses, and the vast majority of their brains, are built to detect and discriminate small quantities of odor, picking out single scents among the millions of other scents in the environment. Dogs have been selectively bred for thousands of years to serve myriad human purposes, yet most dogs retain the architecture and ability to scent incredibly well."
WDC has even worked overseas: detecting snakes in the tropics of Guam, locating wild dog and cheetah scat in Kenya, and working with the Andean Cat Project in Argentina to find one of the world's rarest felines.
"We have really learned from our mistakes while working internationally, where the work periods are typically short and the work intense in unfamiliar territory where we have to find dogs and train handlers, which is different from how we usually work," Parker says. Despite such challenges, Parker believes that the program could easily be implemented in other countries.
Megan Parker's dog Pepin, a Belgian malinois, searching a rocks pile for fisher scat. Photo courtesy of Working Dogs for Conservation.
Not just any dog is able to do what WDC requires of them, and the group spends a lot of time and energy training the dog for their demanding tasks. Even finding the right dog can be quite a challenge.
"We comb shelters and rescue facilities for most of our working dogs. We typically select working breeds; the herders, retrievers, shepherds, and other dogs bred for working with people, but most shelter dogs are mixed breeds and we take the dogs that show the behaviors we need. These behaviors are exhibited by an extreme (often called, ‘crazy and obsessive’ by shelter workers) focus on a toy, an ability to ignore distractions (like other dogs, people and food) while focusing on the toy and a willingness to listen to and work with a handler," Parker says.
The dogs are so well-trained that they have even been taught not to 'touch' samples, such as scat, because much of what they look for undergoes DNA testing and any direct contact with the dog could contaminate it. When an object is found these incredible dogs give "a 'passive' alert, meaning that the dog sits or lies near the sample and waits for the handler to reward the dog and process the sample," Parker explains.
With her innovative organization, Parker has proved that dogs may just conservationists' best friends.
In a September interview with mongabay.com, Parker spoke about using dogs to smell out scat, particular plants, and even invasive species; she talked about past projects and where WCD is headed next.
Parker will be presenting at the upcoming Wildlife Conservation Network Expo in San Francisco on October 3rd.
INTERVIEW WITH MEGAN PARKER
Mongabay: What is your background?
Megan Parker: I grew up in Montana and had a perfect childhood, running wild around the mountains, lakes and rivers here. We always had dogs and I started training them when I got my first dog at 10 years old. I started training detection dogs around 1996, when I was involved with the reintroduction of wolves to Idaho and Yellowstone. I have worked as a biologist and conservation biologist in the U.S. from Washington to Florida and in Guatemala, Mongolia, Argentina and Africa. I worked on my PhD research in Botswana, studying African wild dogs and their movement, scent marking behavior and chemistry. This helps me understand some of the fascinating behavioral and chemical qualities of animal communication that informs our work with domestic dogs, using their nose to find information. All the while during these years I kept my work with conservation detection dogs going and growing with partners, friends, trainers and eventual co-founders of Working Dogs for Conservation.
Mongabay: Most people don’t think of dogs as conservation activists. How can dogs help save our environment? 
Co-Founder and Associate Director of WDC, Aimee Hurt, with dog, Wicket, putting a vest on in the truck, getting ready to go. Photo courtesy of Working Dogs for Conservation.
Megan Parker: Canids have evolved as amazing scenting machines. Their noses, and the vast majority of their brains, are built to detect and discriminate small quantities of odor, picking out single scents among the millions of other scents in the environment. Dogs have been selectively bred for thousands of years to serve myriad human purposes, yet most dogs retain the architecture and ability to scent incredibly well. Because dogs tend to also have this crazy affection for humans, occasionally one finds a dog willing to tell a human where and what they smell something they are trained to find.
Mongabay: What is the goal of Working Dogs for Conservation?
Megan Parker: Our mission is to benefit science and conservation by working with detection dogs. We help save wildlife by supporting conservation efforts to gather information on rare species in an accurate and non-invasive way. We train dogs to detect rare samples and they excel at finding trained target odors from endangered species scats to invasive weeds on a huge landscape. We also improve the lives of special rescue dogs by training them for a working life, giving them a home and offering them the ideal life for high-drive, object oriented dogs. They live amazing lives with their handlers and they love to work.
Mongabay: What led you and your partners to establish Working Dogs for Conservation?
Megan Parker: I have been working with a group of amazing, dedicated biologists who are also dog trainers since the 1990’s, and we formed Working Dogs for Conservation as an NGO in 2000. We felt that we could conduct research and provide support for conservation projects best as a non-profit organization, dedicated to serving conservation and research and the welfare of working dogs. Because we are all biologists, we support conservation projects from study design to mapping, but we also conduct our own research, developing methods that will contribute to conservation projects around the world.
THE DOGS
Mongabay: Can you tell us about non-invasive scientific inquiry—how do dogs contribute? 
Debbie Smith, a co-founder and Development Director, training her dog, Colt, on boxes to the target scent. In this case it is the threatened lupine plant-which depends on the endangered Fender's blue butterfly-in the Wilamette Valley of Oregon. Photo courtesy of Working Dogs for Conservation.
Megan Parker: We train our dogs to work hard to find rare samples, often in extremely large and difficult landscapes. The areas we work are often filled with wildlife, livestock and other potential distractions to a dog, but our dogs work with single-minded focus to their trained scent. The dogs do not chase wildlife or domestic animals and can be counted on to stay on task all day long. Our dogs are trained to detect samples, or discriminate among samples, by finding the sample and giving a ‘passive’ alert, meaning that the dog sits or lies near the sample and waits for the handler to reward the dog and process the sample. Many of the samples we collect are used for DNA analyses, so it is important the dogs don’t contaminate the sample by touching it. They simply sit or lie by the sample and wait for their reward until the handler or orienteer (a person who keeps the dog / handler team on the proper compass line or transect across the study site) can collect the data and process the sample properly.
Mongabay: How are your dogs trained to track specific scents, such as moose scat or an invasive weed species?
Megan Parker: We use training techniques that are similar to, and combine aspects of narcotics, search and rescue, bomb and other detection disciplines. We associate the scent of the ‘target’ odor and the dog’s reward, a ball, tug or whatever object the dog is obsessively crazy about. It is simply operant conditioning but it takes an expert to read the dog’s behavior and get the timing right for rewards and corrections. We use positive reward training for this work and the dogs are clearly overjoyed to do this work, have a job and learn these difficult and demanding techniques. People who join us in the field or at demonstrations to observe the dogs can clearly see the focus and effort the dogs put forth, but also the incredible joy they have for this work.
Mongabay: How do you select the dogs to be used for conservation work? Are specific breeds better than others? 
In March 2008, Pepin with his tug toy reward, which Parker calls 'the love of his life'.
Megan Parker: We comb shelters and rescue facilities for most of our working dogs. We typically select working breeds; the herders, retrievers, shepherds, and other dogs bred for working with people, but most shelter dogs are mixed breeds and we take the dogs that show the behaviors we need.
Mongabay.com is an environmental science and conservation news website.
