Dogs have a real nose for wildlife conservation

In fieldwork situations, our canine friends worked faster than people and found four times as many scat samples.

Dogs were trained to discriminate between the scats of local wild species. The trained detection dogs distinguished between species 'with up to 100% accuracy', even when the target species 'were closely related and fed with the same diet'.

Garda sniffer-dog Bouncer discovered €17,500 worth of cocaine recently. The drugs were hidden in a car. Dogs with jobs work as security-guards, guides for sight-impaired people and companions to people who suffer from loneliness and depression.

A study published in 2019 found that dogs can detect cancer tumours with almost 97% accuracy just by smelling blood samples. Researchers at MIT are seeking canine help to develop algorithms so that future smart-phones can function as electronic noses.