Will dogs sniff out social rank? The use of detection dog in wolf scat identification

Abstract

The use of conservation dogs is rapidly increasing. These canine units are usually employed to discriminate target species odor from nontarget ones to monitor or aid in the conservation of species. Although the ability of dogs to identify individuals from the odor of fecal samples is well known, there are no studies yet investigating the ability of dogs to identify social status through scats. Therefore, we conducted a case study to test the effectiveness of a dog in identifying the scats of breeder wolves and ignoring offspring ones. The dog was trained using a multiple-choice carousel in a training/testing protocol. We show that training on three different breeders wolves enabled the dog to identify all the breeder wolves used in the study, indicating rapid generalization of the dog and an ability to train the odor concept. The dog's ability to identify only breeder wolves allows researchers to optimize sample collection in the field for estimating population size by noninvasive genetic analysis and reducing costs.