I don't live in grizz country
Posted: Wed Nov 28, 2007 3:00 pm
but this "scientific" research teaching labs to discriminate between grizzly bear scat and black bear scat struck me as hilarious. Do any of you who live in grizz country have trouble with your dogs trashing on grizzlies? Would dogs that did live to tell about it?
Perhaps I'm wrong. Once, as a pup, my young redbone treed a horse trailer with a "performing" grizzly cub at our local park...
http://ibscore.dbs.umt.edu/journal/Arti ... 0/Hurt.htm
Executive Summary
The last decade has seen an increase in the use of dogs by wildlife researchers and managers. In addition to the commonplace use of dogs by police officers and search and rescue crews, dogs have been used to monitor wolf packs, manage human-habituated bears, and locate the feces (scat) of endangered species so that it could be analyzed for genetic information.
Grizzly bears are an endangered species and the focus of many research projects. However, their scat is not visually distinguishable from the scat of black bears, a relatively abundant species that is not endangered. Dogs who could distinguish between the two would be valuable resources as a pre-lab litmus test of species identification. Our study successfully trained three dogs to distinguish between grizzly bear and black bear scat when presented together in a scent box—a common apparatus used for narcotic detection training. While the overall success rates of 65% for one dog and 85% for the other two were fairly high, they were even higher in rounds that contained familiar grizzly scat. Because of this we concluded that dogs must be trained with a much greater diversity of grizzly scat to increase their ability to generalize grizzly scat odor. Additionally they need more hours of training than we provided them. Finally, to withstand the repetitive rigor of this type of detection work, the dogs must be carefully selected for this work.
I
Perhaps I'm wrong. Once, as a pup, my young redbone treed a horse trailer with a "performing" grizzly cub at our local park...
http://ibscore.dbs.umt.edu/journal/Arti ... 0/Hurt.htm
Executive Summary
The last decade has seen an increase in the use of dogs by wildlife researchers and managers. In addition to the commonplace use of dogs by police officers and search and rescue crews, dogs have been used to monitor wolf packs, manage human-habituated bears, and locate the feces (scat) of endangered species so that it could be analyzed for genetic information.
Grizzly bears are an endangered species and the focus of many research projects. However, their scat is not visually distinguishable from the scat of black bears, a relatively abundant species that is not endangered. Dogs who could distinguish between the two would be valuable resources as a pre-lab litmus test of species identification. Our study successfully trained three dogs to distinguish between grizzly bear and black bear scat when presented together in a scent box—a common apparatus used for narcotic detection training. While the overall success rates of 65% for one dog and 85% for the other two were fairly high, they were even higher in rounds that contained familiar grizzly scat. Because of this we concluded that dogs must be trained with a much greater diversity of grizzly scat to increase their ability to generalize grizzly scat odor. Additionally they need more hours of training than we provided them. Finally, to withstand the repetitive rigor of this type of detection work, the dogs must be carefully selected for this work.
I
