Sniffer dogs being used to track cheetah

Louise Wilson, of Wagtail UK with Belgiant Sheperd Gala, one of the dogs she is training to detect cheetah.

July 2010. Cheetahs have been in decline for several decades, and are becoming increasingly rare across Africa, and it is now on the endangered species list. However they can be elusive and hard to study, but a Welsh company that specializes in training sniffer dogs is helping to track down these elusive big cats in their native South Africa.

Louise Wilson, from Flintshire-based specialist sniffer dog company Wagtail UK, is helping set up a scheme that will train dogs to find cheetah scat. Louise is just back from World Cup-mad South Africa where she was the guest of the Endangered Wildlife Trust (EWT), a South African-based charity who was keen to see if dogs could be used in conservation work.

Wide range of uses
Collin Singer, a former RAF Police dog handler, set up Wagtail UK in 2003 and the company now specializes in training and using sniffer dogs to detect everything from drugs to explosives to human bodies. They have also seen the potential for the use of dogs in wildlife work which is where Louise's involvement with the EWT came about.

She said: "I studied Animal Behavior and Welfare at Chester University and I have a passionate interest in conservation so I was delighted to get involved. The EWT were interested to find out if dogs could work in their environment where the temperature is very high, it's dusty and you are dealing with vast areas of land. I see huge potential for the use of dogs in this field because they are able to find rare animals in a non-invasive way. There's no shooting them with dart guns, tranquillizing them and fitting them with special tracking collars.

Sniffer dogs are already used in North America to search for rare animals. Auburn University handler Bart Rogers works with Bishop, a 3-year-old black Labrador retriever. Click here to read more.

"The dogs can be trained to find their scat, they don't bother or upset the cheetahs and it means the scats can be examined so that conservationists know what sort of diet the animals have and how healthy they are. South Africa is just such a fantastic place. It's so spectacular and the wildlife is amazing - you're out there in the bush at night and you can hear the hyenas and jackals calling and all the other sounds."

Louise has been working closely with Rox Brummer, EWT's Carnivore Conflict Officer in northern South Africa, close to the borders with Zimbabwe and Botswana and she shares Louise's enthusiasm for the use of dogs in tracking the rare animals.

Rox said: "Cheetahs are very shy cats and get stressed very easily and the darting procedure can be very risky for them. Using scat detection dogs means you can potentially sample all the animals in a population rather than just a few. This will give researchers a much fuller picture of what is going on within the cheetah population so we can find out how many cheetahs there are, the state of their health and their dietary preferences, all without seeing a single cheetah." 

Blue swallow
The sniffer dog unit at the EWT is in its early stages, and Louise's started schooling two dogs, Minkie, a daschund, and Gala, a Malinois or Belgian Shepherd. She believes both have the potential to be trained to detect cheetahs and also another rare species, the blue swallow.

"I can't believe dogs are not more widely used within conservation because they're so ideal and it's something that we can bring back and use in this country with our own rare and endangered species. And dogs are easily available, cost effective, efficient and fast. At Wagtail we have some amazing ideas and projects running with regard to a conservation dog section here in the UK and we really want to hear from people about using dogs for conservation. 

16 weeks training to detect a scent
Louise said that dogs can be trained to detect a scent in as little as 16 weeks and in Africa they would have to work off-lead much of the time and have a bell on to warn animals of their approach as well as being well trained in recall.

To make donations to the Endangered Wildlife Trust or for more information go to www.ewt.org.za or contact Rox Brummer at roxb@ewt.org.za or vanessa bezuidenhout for funding at vanessab@ewt.org.za, ref wagtail.
For more information regarding Wagtail UK Ltd and the use of conservation dogs within the UK contact Louise Wilson on info@wagtailuk.com or louise.wilson@wagtailuk.com or go to www.wagtailuk.com