When one thinks of detection dogs, normally bombs and drugs come to mind, but researchers at Auburn University are adding some not-so-familiar items to that list.

Todd Steury, assistant professor of forestry and wildlife sciences at Auburn, focuses on carnivores and their conservation, namely long tailed weasels, black bears and Eastern spotted skunks.

After trying to locate these animals using game cameras without much luck, he decided to turn to dogs to help him find the animals.

At the time, there were only three places in the country with dogs that he could use, and unfortunately, all were too expensive and far away, with two in Washington State and one in Montana.

Without the time or money to use the other programs, Steury began to research how to train dogs of his own, and stumbled upon Auburn University’s dog training capacity.

“It turned out that Auburn has this Canine Detection and Research Institute, which is the largest detection dog training facility outside the government in the united States,” Steury said. “So I contacted them about the possibility of training a dog to find scat and they looked at me kind of funny, but they said, ‘Yeah, we can do it.’ So EcoDogs was essentially born.”

EcoDogs is currently the only program of its kind in the Eastern United States, and provides dogs that can find scat from a number of different species, fungus and even pythons.

Scat, or animal excrement, is a useful tool for conservationists like Steury, in providing data about endangered species.

"Scat provides a lot of really valuable information about the species,” Steury said. “If you find the scat, the species obviously used that habitat, scat can provide DNA, can tell you about what animals are eating—and it's easy to train dogs to find scat."

The dogs are trained to associate a certain smell with a reward, which they get only when they correctly identify the smell, and the more enthusiastic about the reward, the better.

"The kind of dogs we want for the program is the kind of dog that brings you its tennis ball and you throw the tennis ball 100 times and your arm's about ready to fall off, and the dog just wants to keep going—all it wants is the tennis ball,” Steury said. “Those are the kind of dogs we want.”

With anywhere from 10 to 15 dogs in the program at a time, the dogs are trained to find specific types of scat and invasive pine root fungus.

Using dogs to detect this type of root fungus is a revolutionary approach to the problem, which is now managed by digging roots up and using airplanes to detect dead trees.

Replacing those methods with dogs means a less invasive, more efficient way to handle this problem.

"This could be a very positive step. It's not a cure, but we hope the dogs will help advance our management of the pine plantations and help in our research to stop the disease," said Lori Eckhart, an associate professor of Forestry and Wildlife Sciences at Auburn in an auburn.edu article.

The dogs can be leased by anyone with a legitimate use for them, and have worked with the National Parks Service to find pythons in the Florida Everglades and the University of Kentucky to find grey fox, coyote and bobcat scat.

“These dogs work incredibly hard. They love what they're doing. I mean, some of these dogs are so intense that they will literally work themselves to death,” Steury said. “They just work to the point of exhaustion and we actually have to force them occasionally to stop and take breaks. We tie them to trees so they'll stop searching.”

In the Daniel Boone National Forest, while working with the University of Kentucky, the dogs were able to prove just how efficient they are at finding scat.

Steury said the people at Kentucky were hesitant to use the dogs at first, because of the expensive cost. During the job, hair snares, or small rings of barbed wire placed around a bait to grab clumps of hair from any animal inspecting the bait, were also set up to try and gain DNA samples that way.

In the 20 days of work in the Daniel Boone National forest, two dogs were able to find about 260 scats, while almost 100 hair snares turned up seven DNA specimens.

“That's kind of the point I make to people,” Steury said. “The dogs are expensive in an absolute sense, but their cost per unit data is actually often much cheaper than other methods.”

The dogs, all Labrador Retrievers, have excellent noses, and can detect animal scat even after three months of weathering on the ground.

"We've done experiments where we've put scat in the field to look at factors that influence how long the dogs can find scat,” Steury said. “In fact, we had scats out for three months and the dogs were still finding it and we had to end the project because it was time to finish it. They could have found it much longer than that, we just don't know.”

The EcoDogs program is the only one of its kind in the country that is affiliated with a college of veterinary medicine, meaning the dogs are handled with expert precision.

"These dogs are really, really well cared for. They get very frequent exams from vets and they get to do something they really love,” Steury said. “They get to go out in nature on a regular basis and work, and it's pretty clear that they really, really love what they're doing.”

The program is still new, and given the expensive costs of maintaining a program like this, the present goal for EcoDogs is to keep progressing.

“I wanted to be able to use the dogs for my research, but ultimately I can't possibly generate enough grant money to cover the cost of maintaining dogs and the handlers,” Steury said. “So at this point our real goal is to get the word out there and to get the program growing, primarily so it becomes self-sustaining.”