This story gives a brand new meaning to dogs being man’s best friend. Not only do dogs have a special place in our human hearts, they’re also now actively doing their part to save and conserve the planet.
Working Dogs for Conservation has been around since 2011 and it has been leading the world when it comes to training dogs for world conservation. WD4C trains dogs to protect wildlife through their sense of smell. Through dogs’ powerful sense of smell, they can easily track animals that need to be protected.
WD4C has dogs like Lily who is a Labrador Retriever that can detect 12 scents, including that of a Grizzly Bear. Through techniques from search and rescue, cadaver detection, and narcotics detection, she can easily track wildlife that needs to be conserved and protected.
WD4C currently has 35 dogs in their training. Such dogs have been helping scientists and researchers in finding species and samples for conservation purposes.
Through dogs like Lily, conservation movements need not be expensive and harmful. Conservation can now be effected without the use of helicopters, dangerous amounts of tranquilizers, traps, and malfunctioning cameras. Conservation dogs solved all such issues and even proved to be 40x faster than other techniques.
WD4C is glad to report that all their dogs have been actively working and traveling in five continents and have been leading their task force when it comes to monitoring wildlife, detecting species, and preventing illegal wildlife trafficking and poaching.
WD4C shared in their website how scientists have been working for years to create an instrument that is as sensitive as a dog’s nose and the they send all the luck to such research. But for now they say that WD4C will stick to their pack as their mighty dogs can very well execute the task of conserving and saving the world, one sniff at a time. Thank God for dogs!