Scent detection dogs now sniffing out pests before they hit the remote Hawaiian Islands
By Diane Ako
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HONOLULU (KITV) — Demand for scent detection dogs is on the rise. Conservation Dogs of Hawaii (CDH) is an Oahu nonprofit that launched a biosecurity program this spring.
This canine detection team scours a ship looking for pests.
“A detection dog is a sniffer dog using their smell to find invasive pests that ships, boats, and planes can carry overseas,” said Kyoko Johnson, founder of CDH.
In fact, she and a dog named Bear spent Wednesday morning on a NOAA ship.
“They’re required to do that before sailing to Papahanaumokuakea,” she said.
Bear is trained to find live rats and mice, and their scat. At 25-pounds, she is the ideal size to work on a boat because she can get into little crawl spaces and be lifted up to high spaces.
Before Johnson’s group started taking clients for its biosecurity program this year, exterminators did this kind of work. The advantages of using a dog are that pest control companies don’t specialize in vessels so there could be a wait for their service. And “dogs are able to find things that can’t be found visually. A lot of these boats are really cluttered,” said Johnson.
Right now, the group screens ships and planes headed to the remote Hawaiian Islands. In the future, Johnson would like to include the main Hawaiian Islands.
“It’s to prevent them from getting to other places with sensitive ecosystems and wildlife,” she said.
And despite what it costs to hire the dogs, “to prevent it would save you potentially millions of dollars and damage to the wildlife,” Johnson pointed out, citing the years and millions of dollars it costs the government to remove the mice attacking albatrosses at Midway Atoll, or the Yellow Crazy Ants that infected the ground nesting birds at Johnson Atoll.
Johnson’s seen how hard it is to eradicate a pest once it’s taken hold. She says an ounce of prevention is definitely worth a pound of cure.
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