Jake and Ivy are python-hunting Labrador retrievers.
Mark Derr sent me this link about some python tracking dogs in the Everglades:
The scenario sounds like a low-budget movie from the 1970s: humongous snakes are on the loose, eating everything in sight. But this is real – a problem that an American university and its canines are helping to combat.
Auburn researchers used detection dogs in the Everglades National Park to find Burmese pythons during a recent study on ways to manage and eradicate these non-native, invasive snakes, which are eating native wildlife, mostly mammals and birds.
‘The ultimate use for detection dogs is to suppress the expanding python population and to eliminate them in small areas, such as on an island. Our main concern is their impact on other wildlife,’ said Christina Romagosa of Auburn’s School of Forestry and Wildlife Sciences.
‘Interraction with humans is also a problem. The snakes, like alligators, can get in swimming pools, eat small dogs and cats, and could injure a human.’
Auburn worked last year with the Everglades Cooperative Invasive Species Management Area, or ECISMA, to test how well dogs could pinpoint the snakes’ locations so wildlife agencies could remove the snakes.
The problem started years ago, and was probably a result of irresponsible python owners.
***
Jake and Ivy, both black Labrador retrievers, helped the researchers capture 19 pythons, most between six and eight feet in length, including a pregnant one with 19 viable eggs. Burmese pythons in their native range in South East Asia have been known to reach up to 20 feet and weigh almost 200lb. The National Park Service has counted 1,825 Burmese pythons that have been caught in and around Everglades National Park since 2000.
‘We found the use of detection dogs to be a valuable addition to the current tools used to manage and control pythons,’ said Romagosa. ‘Dog search teams can cover more distance and can have higher accuracy rates in particular scenarios than human searchers. We suggest that dogs be used as a complement to current search and trapping methods.’
The Auburn study found that dogs and their sense of smell were two-and-a-half times faster than people visually searching, but people did have the advantage in extreme humidity. Searches by detection dogs are ideal in the cooler months, Romagosa says, when dogs can work longer periods of time without overheating. [A huge problem with any double-coated dog, especially a black one.]
‘Dogs can also be used throughout the year as part of a rapid response team going to a python sighting, which can be helpful in an urban as well as natural environment,’ she said.
The dogs are trained to ‘alert’, or sit down, when they got within five meters of a python.
‘When the dogs alerted to a python’s presence in the field, we would put them in the truck so they would not come in contact with it,’ trainer Bart Rogers said. ‘The dogs could even track pythons that had been present in the area hours earlier. They did not pay attention to ‘gators and other snakes, which would also avoid the dogs.’
Interestingly, the Labrador retrievers, which love to get wet, had to be trained not to go into the water.
‘They love the water but in the training we reward them for staying out of it,’ added Rogers. ‘We could train them to find pythons in water, but we are limited in that we couldn’t easily capture pythons if they are under water.’
The snakes found by the dogs have been sent to Skip Snow, a National Park Service biologist at the Everglades National Park. Some snakes were euthanized, some were tagged with radio telemetry devices for further study and tracking, and some were donated to the Nature Conservancy for use in training personnel how to catch snakes.
A driven retriever can be trained to find just about anything.
When I was a kid, my grandpa lost his wallet deer hunting.
My dad took one our dogs out and got her to fetch a wallet a few times.
Then he got my grandpa to throw the wallet a few times.
They went to the woods where my grandpa had been hunting, and she found the wallet, which had several hundred dollars in it, in less than 20 minutes.
If they can find wallets, they can find snakes!
Ya gotta love it–ain’t dogs wonderful?
My biggest concern (other than the climate and alligators) is that they might come on a really big python. But the handlers seem to have all the contingencies covered. I’ll bet they could also train them to track, catch and hold/retrieve Green Iguanas. They’re a popular food item in Latin America, and an entrepreneurial hunter w/ the right dogs might just strike gold w/ this scheme.
It also seems to me that selected cross-bred lurchers (Lab/Greyhound perhaps, or some of the local hound landraces) might be a better fit for the climate.
Its all good up until the news comes on the TV “Large python found with a Labrador in its coils today. The Snake was killed before it got the Labrador’s head all the way in its mouth but it was too late…The Labrador was already dead”.
hmmm.
Still….pretty cool.
Either way. ;-)
Yeah, but the same could be said for dogs that are used to catch or deter bears, or hogs or badgers, or criminals, or even those dogs used to round up domestic cattle. We’ve been using dogs as safe surrogates for handling dangerous animals for a very long time.
In Argentina we the gov uses golden retrievers to detect dollars. Uruguay our neighbour is a kind of fiscal paradise, to many people go to Uruguay with undeclared money. They begun a few weeks agos and have detected hundreds of thousands of dollars that were going to money loundered.
Here you can see a golden retriever smelling a car trying to detect dollars and euros.
a lot more pics here http://www.google.com.ar/search?hl=es&client=firefox-a&hs=3TH&rls=org.mozilla:es-ES:official&q=perros+detectan+dolares&bav=on.2,or.r_gc.r_pw.,cf.osb&biw=1024&bih=612&um=1&ie=UTF-8&tbm=isch&source=og&sa=N&tab=wi&ei=Q7dTT725OcyUtwfwmsG6DQ
just google perros detectan dolares and search for the images
I was able to get the photos of them.
We could use those dogs whenever Mitt Romney leaves the country.
The part about the dogs being able to find snakes in water is good. I knew a woman who grew up in a cabin in the woods in a southern state in the USA. She said that one day after breakfast, during the summer, all the kids went out to play, but her littlest brother would not leave the porch. Her daddy remembered the the last time they found a poisonous snake in the yard, the little boy had also refused to leave the porch.
The daddy asked the little boy how he knew there was a poisonious snake in the yard that morning. The little boy said “the cat”.
So the daddy picked up the dead snake and walked towards the cat, which took off running and did not return untl almost suppertime.
After that they learned that if the cat wouldn’t follow them off the porch then something bad was in the yard.
I doubted the story at first because cats have such tiny narrow nostrils, but several backwoods people have confirmed that, like the seals in your other post who took off because they heard a seagull shreek alarm to other seagulls, they as children learned to watch the expressions of animals and listen to the birds.
I am told that the ability of people to read the expressions of dogs and people’s ability to train dogs has resulted in police dogs that can find drowned bodies and sunk murder victims who are at the bottom of a lake. The dog does this just by riding in a boat sniffing the air. Cool.
Dogs can be trained to detect and alert on almost anything. Glen Johnson trained dogs to find leaks in natural gas lines, and others to find gypsy moth nests, more than 20 years ago. Other items now targeted include bedbugs, invasive plants, various drugs in a zillion locations, banned meats and plants with air travellers, counterfeit CDs and DVDs, and who-knows-what more. There are even dogs that can detect cancer in both tissue and in exhaled breath.
Dogs were used back around 1975 to identify the car in which Jimmy Hoffa’s body had been transported. (Although the body itself was never found.) Two or more dogs are used, independently, to confirm such a find. In this case, all three dogs agreed.