It's wildlife poop. It's the waste products of animals that actually has a lot of value. The center specializes in extracting DNA and hormone information from organic materials in order to learn more about endangered wildlife. I'm

imagining people listening to this and thinking, okay, so these dogs are sent out to find poop, basically. I have a dog who is always finding and consuming poop. And they might be thinking, wow, this is the life, right? This must be the most fun thing ever. And maybe my dog could be a detection dog.

I used to say that most dogs can't do this work because you have to have a dog that if given the opportunity to go get a ball that's laying on the floor or grab a piece of steak, we want the dog that goes for the ball and ignores the steak. One thing I love about conservation canines is that they're all rescue dogs. And I've

heard you say that you work with dogs who are called unadoptable. Can you explain what you mean? While

many working dogs are bred to be a working dog, we're looking for dogs that have the right personality. And when visiting shelters, you see what dogs do not get adopted out. and they're the ones that are, you know, quote-unquote crazy or too much energy, just not suitable for the home. That works really well for us because we want a dog that has lots of energy. From

the scat the dogs locate, the researchers back in the lab can figure out who the animals are,

where they are, and what kind of shape they're in. We can get hormone measurements, which helps us determine how stressed or healthy or pregnant an animal is. We can also get a lot of DNA information that gives us population estimates on a species in the area. We can also get the DNA of the prey that the animal ate. And here, the animal doesn't even know that we were out there most of the time. We can find scat that was pooped five minutes earlier, but we can also find scat that's been there for

more than a year. I have a long list of animals that the dogs have been trained on, and I want you to fill in any who I've missed. I have short-tailed weasels, cougars, saw-wet owls, tigers, lynx, wild boar, European badgers, pine martins, grizzly bear, wolf, coyote, lion, cheetah, wild dog, hyena, bats, pocket mice, salamander, fisher, wolverine, mink, the silver spot caterpillar whose scat is called

frass. Yes.

Did I miss any? Oh, swift fox, the

feathers of goshawk and the pellets of a goshawk, and then the egg masses of the American bullfrog. We have quite the freezer. Our freezer is just a beautiful library of scat from studies going back 20 years now. It also has whale scat.

Julianne's first job as a handler was working with Tucker, an orca scat detection dog. Orca detection dog Tucker, yes. Tell us a little bit about how orca scat works. I mean, you've got these killer whales pooping in the sea. Yeah. How is a dog supposed to detect that? The scat

of this whale, it looks like snot, smells like salmon, and it has enough fat content that it floats on the water for a short period of time. So the fact it floats is our window of opportunity as scientists to get in there and get a scat sample. So Tucker is our secret weapon. He helped us figure out that we could collect scat samples from these whales at a safe distance, meaning we're not trying to interfere with the feeding habits of the whales. We're not driving our boat right into the pod. So it's a really great non-invasive way of collecting information on these whales.

to detect scat a nautical mile away, which seemed extraordinarily impressive for something that was just momentarily on the surface of the sea. It didn't make sense to us because it seemed like, oh,

he must have been alerting to something else. But no, it was just that he was alerting to it much further away than we thought possible. Tucker rides on the bow of a small boat, and he looks very stoic. It's the handler's job and the boat driver's job to just watch. His little nostrils would be twitching from side to side, and when the wind blew and carried the odor of the scat on he would just snap into action. So watching Tucker work on the boat, he can't run. And we actually selected him as a really great whale dog because he is a lab that doesn't like to swim. So

he won't jump

in. So he won't jump in. So Tucker stays on the boat and it's Tucker's job to go from one side of the boat to the other. And he's basically telling everyone, like, the odor is upwind now. And then once he would move his head the other direction, the boat driver would know that we've passed the scent cone, we need to go back. It's amazing, because if he had a voice, he'd be going, go right, go left, go right. He doesn't. He's just turning his head. And the dog handler is then communicating, go right, go left, go right, go straight. So the boat is doing this zigzaggy pattern. And when the boat is going right into the source of that target odor, Tucker's right on the bow of the boat. That's great.

It's beautiful. The more people hear about it, the more they're convinced that dogs' ability is sui generis, completely unlike what we can smell. That may be true, but our noses are perfectly good instruments themselves, if we just bother to sniff. After the break, we'll hear more from Julianne about what the conservation canine dogs have found for her. And I'll do some smelling of my own, with a few friends. Read these instructions carefully before

beginning, it says. I'm not going to

read the instructions carefully, but I get the gist. So stay with us. Stay with us.