A SHEEP DOG of a DIFFERENT KIND

BY CHESTER MOORE

Adog’s nose is somewhere between 1,000 and 10,000 times more sensitive than that of a human.

Frequent discoveries of dogs’ smelling abilities have led training experts to develop complex tasks for canines such as sniffing out bombs and discovering bodies that have been buried and missing for years.

Now, that great power is being harnessed for wild sheep conservation.

Working Dogs for Conservation (WD4C) in conjunction with

Wild Sheep Foundation (WSF), Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks, along with Utah and Montana State Universities are partnering to bring high-level dog training to the fight against disease in wild sheep.

The premise?

Train dogs to smell sheep feces and detect Mycoplasma ovipneumoniae (Movi), the pathogen that wreaks havoc on bighorn herds.

“Poop sniffing dogs, who knew?” commented Gray N. Thornton, President, and CEO of the WSF.

“We are thrilled to have another tool in the toolbox for keeping wild sheep on the mountain. Besides overabundant predators, the bane of wild sheep today is disease transmission. There is more work to do, but from what we’ve seen thus far, our canine friends could be a game-changer.”

Working Dogs for Conservation

WD4C has been around since the mid-1990s and had origins in biological monitoring.

“We were involved in finding species. We would mainly use the dogs to find scat and that became very important when advances in DNA detection were found and we could locate scat and it could be examined and the species confirmed by its DNA,” said WD4C Executive Director Pete Coppolillo.

“That’s where we started, and we still do a lot of that, but we diversified very quickly. We started working in the field of wildlife crime with different agencies around the country and in Africa and Asia with wildlife trafficking issues.”

The group also works in the field of biosecurity which initially involved the detection of invasive species but has expanded into disease work.

“This has many interesting possibilities and is what has led us into partnership with WSF,” Coppolillo said.

Mask Wearing Sheep

During the COVID-19 pandemic

WD4C use Movi as a model respiratory pathogen in domestic sheep to see if dogs could sniff COVID infections on discarded surgical masks from first responders.

“It was early days in COVID, and we didn’t know much about how to handle this so we decided to just try a respiratory disease, and if we can do that, then we should be able to apply it to COVID,” Coppolillo said.

“We worked with a herd of sheep at Montana State University that was clean and not exposed and then they were experimentally infected with Movi which is just a background infection in domestic sheep.”

The sheep were initially infected as part of another study and WD4C asked researchers to put surgical masks on the sheep.

“They did it and this was when the politics of masks was kind of at its peak, so you look at the pictures and it’s kind of funny today. But they made it work and the sheep would wear masks for a half an hour at a time and it was successful,” Coppolillo said.

The dogs were able to detect Movi on the masks and at the same time, they were able to collect dung from the sheep to lead to further studies.

A Discriminating Nose

Coppolillo said with dogs, tasks like this are as much about discrimination as detection.

“What I mean by that is dogs are good at telling the difference between two odors, not just detecting them at very low levels. They can tell the difference between an individual that is infected and one that is not infected and in fact, they can tell the difference in dung from the same individual before and after they were infected.”

“And that’s the gold standard. It’s about whether they are detecting the bug or the infection, not just memorizing what sheep number one smells like and getting rewarded for that,” he added.

Dogs are clever and want to get rewarded and don’t understand necessarily that trainers are asking for the disease, not the individual.

“If you only train with three or four sheep, for example, they will memorize them and give you the answer you want, so the before and after have been powerful. So now what we’re doing is translating that to wild sheep work.”

Bighorn Applications

For wild sheep, the situation is much more complex because virtually every population has some sort of respiratory pathogen.

“The current thinking, and I am not an epidemiologist, is that Movi is the nasty one and it brings out all the others and makes everything worse. It’s a messy situation but agencies all over the country are sending us samples to test because no one wants to move infected animals around and they must go through a lot to make a capture event work,” Coppolillo said.

When bighorns are captured, they have to be put into trailers and held until they can be tested and then decisions are made on which sheep can and cannot be released.

“Our vision is they can give us a dung sample right then and we can give them an answer in real-time and say this one is hot or this one looks good and then a manager can decide on what to do. Perhaps the ones detected as hot can be held and then officials can issue a lab confirmation to make a final decision,” Coppolillo said.

He believes a well-trained dog is as good as a medical test, but there are different comfort levels with dogs, and wildlife officials will have to make these decisions.

Coppolillo admits there are challenges.

They don’t yet know specifically what it is that the dog keys in on, and each individual may be doing it differently. He also mentions that they have a lot of work to do to figure out whether the dogs are just recognizing a sick individual or if they are recognizing the specific disease.

“We are going in that direction once we get the dogs trained and getting high levels of reliability which is happening now. We are doing aging experiments and put out known positive samples to see how long that odor signature lasts,” he said.

“If this works the way we think it might, it would be amazing because then you wouldn’t even have to capture animals. If you want to put sheep into a new area you could run dogs in that area to see if there are issues from any free-ranging domestic sheep or goats.”

A researcher at Montana State University has cultured pure Movi for WD4C.

“What we’re hoping is that by training on the bug itself, the dogs will generalize, so that if we did see it in feral goats, mountain goats, or domestic sheep the dog will alert to that. But the truth is it’s a very complex problem and each dog may key in on something different. It’s something we will continue to work on,” he said.

He likens it to fishermen who can instinctively tell what kind of fish they have before they get a good look. Some can tell it’s a brown trout for example, by the type of tug and some can identify it by a quick roll.

“They can all tell what kind of fish is biting but do it in different ways. And the dogs are probably very much like this. They could be picking up on different things that lead to the same conclusion.”

In Case You’re Still Doubting a Dog’s Nose

The fishing analogy makes even more sense when you realize what WD4C dogs have recently done in invasive fish detection.

“We had a conversation with Carter Cruise who is the aquatic specialist for Turner Enterprises and works on Ted Turner’s properties. Turner has done some great things with his properties and species like the bison,” Coppolillo said.

“Cruise has removed brook trout from an area in Montana and wanted to see if they were coming back. Electrofishing which is how you would normally sample is hard, slow work and it’s kind of expensive, and in some circumstances, it can be a little dangerous. So, he wanted to know if we could find a better way to do this and try dogs.”

The dogs were trained using a combination of methods, including swabbing fish with clean cotton to capture the odor and then using those swabs to train the dogs to recognize the odor of different fish species. The dogs were also tested on their ability to discriminate between different fish species in a controlled aquatic environment.

After this, they were taken out into the field to test their ability to detect fish in a natural environment. The dogs were able to successfully detect fish in a small stream on the Turner Enterprises property.

“By putting brook trout in one fish trap on the Turner property and then rainbow trout in another, we were able to establish the dogs could distinguish between the species. And yes, both traps were underwater,” Coppolillo said.

This allows the aquatic manager to go in and electroshock if there are invasives.

All In

If current projections prove correct in the coming months, dogs may eventually be able to sample a herd’s disease status within their habitat without capturing or handling a single animal.

The same techniques could help domestic sheep producers ensure that their herds aren’t adversely affecting wild sheep.

“There is still work to be done, but WSF is all in,” Thornton said.

“If we can detect infected animals without captures and handling, what we invest in these testing captures can be put to other uses, like habitat enhancements. More importantly, will be the ability to translocate wild sheep to new ranges with high confidence that we’re moving healthy sheep and not spreading disease along with them.”

Michele Vasquez is a canine field specialist with WD4C and will be heavily involved with tests moving forward.

“We’re ready to move forward on this project and appreciate the funding and cooperation from WSF which has really helped us on what we believe is an important project,” she said.

The dogs are ready too.

“Right now, we have three dogs that will be on all sheep captures we participate in. They are Leo, a German short-haired pointer, Stella, a golden retriever, and a Zoey a German shepherd/pit bull/husky mix,” she said.

Vasquez noted there are two Labrador retrievers (Finn and Benny) also doing sheep work.

“We just have them on cultured bacteria and experimentally infected sheep scat and haven’t decided if we want them on wild scat yet,” she said.

The breed of the dog isn’t as important as its ability to learn and enthusiasm to take to the field and do tasks.

“We show our dog lots of love and they reward us with doing things we could never do and through our training, it benefits wildlife, and this case in particular, wild sheep,” Vasquez said.

Tests will be ongoing throughout 2023 and include captures in the Badlands of South Dakota and Nebraska in the spring.

The hope is these dogs will not only be man’s best friend but become an ally for wild sheep as well.

Perhaps we are entering the era of an entirely new kind of sheep dog. WS

by Chester Moore