Canine Jobs: Preserving, Controlling and Protecting Wildlife

Dogs aren’t just entertaining companions, therapy or service animals, they also help protect and conserve wildlife.

In efforts to curtail human and wildlife conflicts, canines are being used to keep mountain goats, sheep and even bears away from areas in parks where they may encounter humans.

(Gracie, nps.gov)

This summer Glacier National Park in Montana implemented “Bark Ranger” a pilot project using Gracie the border collie to train wildlife to stay away from popular areas in the park.

Gracie is also a magnet for park visitors and helps ranger Mark Biel connect with visitors to talk about a range of safety issues.

"No one wants to talk to me, but if they see her they come up and pet her, then I've got you," Biel told National Public Radio.

Waterton National Park, just across the border in Canada from Glacier Park, has been using collies around aggressive deer protecting their fawns since 2009.

Within a few years of launching the program, adverse encounters between deer and people in Waterton fell from 40 each season to just four.

Some canines have a job controlling an animal people consider much more dangerous - bears.

A variety of parks, including Kananaskis Country in Alberta, Canada, use Karelian bear dogs to deter bears from venturing near roads, campgrounds or other areas where they may encounter humans.

Wind River Bear Institute, a well-known non-profit organization in Montana, offers on-site consultation and courses for bear managers, private groups and individuals in bear shepherding, conflict prevention and Karelian bear dog training and handling.

The bear dogs are very independent and will bark an alert as soon as they sense a bear in the area.

They almost always work in teams of two dogs and two trainers. The dogs may track individually, but once a bear is located, they work as a team to shepherd it to a safer location.

Wildlife control canine, Piper, has doesn’t work in a park, but rather at the Cherry Capital Airport in Michigan.

He spends his days keeping birds and other wildlife off and away from the runways, and has proven to be very popular with humans - he has over 47,000 followers on Instagram.

But not all dogs working with wildlife have direct contact with them.

Conservation Canines are scent detecting dogs trained to locate wildlife scat over large areas.

The scat samples, which are collected and analyzed, enable researchers to ascertain species abundance, distribution, resource use, and physiological health all in relation to the environmental pressure(s) the species is encountering.

Wow! Wildlife conservation, protection and control - all in a day’s work for some talented canines.

Australia Uses Sheepdogs to Save Penguin Colony

Australians have put Maremma sheepdogs, typically guardians which protect sheep against attacks by wolves, to use protecting Little Penguins.

On a wee island near the coastal town of Warrnambool, the sheepdogs behind the Middle Island Maremma Project which began in 2006, have proven productive in guarding the smallest of the penguin species from would-be-predators, particularly foxes.

The dogs, which are white with floppy ears and weigh in at about 75 to 100 lbs, can be traced back thousands of years and have a reputation for guarding herd animals from wild predators and thieves but are also known for being gentle and devoted to humans and other animals in their posse. Unlike other herding dogs which nip and chase those in their care, Maremma dogs form social bonds with the animals they are protecting.

And they have done remarkably well in their duties to safeguard penguins. Little Penguins' population in Australia peaked at about 1,500 but was down to about 700 in the 1990s. In the following years, the population was subjected to havoc wrought by foxes who killed dozens of the birds, particularly in nocturnal sprees (in one bloodbath foxes killed 180 penguins) while humans trampled their fragile environment.

By about 2005 numbers of the penguins, once common along Australia's southern coast, were down to about 10. That changed when two men mused that territorial Maremma sheepdogs should be deployed.

A local farmer, known as Swampy Marsh, saw how the Maremma dogs had done well protecting his free-range chickens from becoming dinner for prey and suggested the canines help remedy the penguins' plight. But, he once bemoaned to reporters, “the powers that be wouldn't listen to me until it got down to six penguins.” With a green light from local authorities, they launched a short-term trial which was extended given it worked so well. 

By 2015, Little Penguin numbers had climbed back to triple digits.

Later, two puppies purchased by fundraising efforts were trained to bond with sheep and also to see if they could be put to work to protect bandicoots, a small marsupial not seen outside captivity since 2002. If successful, the trial could result in the creation of a Fighting Extinction Dog Squad, a specially trained squad of dogs that protect and help monitor a host of native wildlife.

The hope is the experiment down under will potentially offer a template for global conservation.

Log onto www.warrnamboolpenguins.com.au for more information.

By Nadia Moharib
Nadia Moharib is an animal lover who has adopted everything from birds to hamsters, salamanders, rabbits, fish and felines. She has written about all-things-pets for years and was a long-time editor of a pet magazine in a daily newspaper which featured a Q & A column, Ask Whit, penned by her pooch (ghost written, of course.) The serial dog owner lives in Calgary, Alberta and most days can be found at a dog park picking up after her rescue pooch, Scoots.