which can be evidence we had benny search for  those casings in some very tall grass when he  

finds a casing he'll lay down with the casing  between his two front paws and he'll basically put  

his nose right on it dogs are an effective tool at  finding wildlife because of their incredible sense  

of smell and their incredible natural hunting  behavior they can basically see the unseen for us

wildlife trafficking is happening  everywhere where somebody thinks  

that they can make some sort of profit  off of wildlife or natural resources  

many people automatically assume it's a problem  in africa it's a problem in asia especially  

those of us in north america we  automatically think it's not our problem  

wildlife trafficking is happening all over the  world there's definitely the concern with wildlife  

trafficking pushing these species to the brink of  extinction but there's a much bigger picture to it  

that people don't often think about when you think  of it on a larger scale it's often tied to other  

crimes trafficking and weapons trafficking  in humans so a lot of this is tied together

a dog is able to smell a teaspoon of sugar  dissolved into the amount of water that would  

fill two olympic swimming pools so that's kind of  the level of specificity that they're able to get  

down to which is just absolutely incredible and  when you compare dogs to human searchers they're  

consistently faster they cover more ground and  they're often more accurate what makes dogs so  

exceptional at this job is their olfactory  ability and their ability to hunt out those  

odors and the ability for us to work with them  they're very trainable they want to do a good job  

they want the reward and so we use the reward  to help show them what we want them to find  

so you can see that he very  much loves and wants his ball

we are at the working dogs for conservation  world headquarters it's 45-ish acres just outside  

of missoula montana we're the world's foremost  conservation detection dog organization so what  

we do is we take primarily rescue dogs we look  for absolutely ball crazy high-energy confident  

rescue dogs that need a job needs something to  do and then we train them and then we put them  

to work protecting wildlife and wild places by  searching for endangered species invasive species  

and things related to wildlife crime we have a  whole bunch of different scents that the dogs have  

been trained to do so that ranges everything  from spotted cat skins so a lot of our dogs  

in africa that's a pretty common contraband  item ivory rhino horn shark fin ammo and guns

i was in wildlife law enforcement for 11  years the past three of those years was as  

a detective with washington department of fish and  wildlife police and as part of that i had k9 benny  

i found him when he was right around one  and a half he was evaluated as a working dog  

he passed the initial evaluation then we  went through a few months of training he  

did very well with that and about a year or  so ago we made the transition to working dogs  

for conservation and since then benny is  being trained on more conservation related  

target odors my dog barley is a six and a half  year old border collie he is in the process of  

learning both shark fin and ivory when i'm  training barley we're generally working with  

buckets or pvc pipes so that there's a lot  of different containers that have different  

things in them and he learns that what he's  supposed to do is tell me about a given scent

one of the really cool things about using  detection dogs is that you can use them at  

multiple stages along the pipeline of wildlife  crime so dogs are able to search vehicles as the  

vehicles are coming into the park where they might  find ammunition or guns that let us know that  

those people were not coming into the park for  the right reasons they also are able to in some  

cases track the animals and actually make sure  the animals are healthy we've had dogs that are  

trained to track specific animals so a specific  rhino and make sure that rhino is doing well  

then if there is a poaching event that occurs we  can use the dogs to track backwards and hopefully  

make an arrest before that contraband ever  makes it to market the dogs can also be used  

to intercept contraband in the example of  searching a vehicle or searching a shipping  

container and intercepting that ivory or shark  fin before it's ever actually able to be sold

my previous job before this was working with dogs  that were deemed unadoptable at shelters due to  

behavior issues working with these high energy  ball crazy high drive dogs is where shelters  

really struggle the most we're not just giving  these dogs a home we're not just rescuing them  

we're actually able to put exactly what  made them a bad pet and put that to use  

protecting other wildlife wild places it's so  special and it's wait it's what really gets me  

excited to come to this job every day the work  we do at wd4c has multiple impacts saving and  

protecting natural resources and helping and  wildlife crime there's also the impact of us  

giving dogs second chances going into  shelters and finding dogs that need  

jobs and need new homes and need a  purpose and we're able to do both of those

things

you