Thank you.
I'm here to talk about dogs, but more specifically, I'm here to talk about bad dogs, and why I love them.
I'm a conservation biologist, meaning I study weird species and try to count them.
And I'm also a trainer of detection dogs, and where those two worlds meet is where I live, and where I work.
Most of the dogs that we get for this kind of work, we scour shelters for because these are bad dogs, and they don't make great pets.
And you know these dogs.
You go to your friend's barbecue, and that dog comes up, and she is so happy to see you she pees on your feet, and she drops this big, slabbery ball in your lap, and you just throw it to try to get as much distance between yourself and this dog as possible, and it comes back, and then by 950th throw you're just thinking, "Oh, just why didn't they get rid of this dog?"
And often they do.
They end up in shelters because they often have this overwhelming desire to bring you things.
(Laughter) They think that you're really enjoying this.
The dog is so happy, thinking that you're all enjoying this game because you're throwing something and it's bringing it to you.
And they're telling you where this thing is, and that's what we've asked them to do over the evolution of time, our companionship with dogs, we've asked them to bring us stuff.
And they do a great job.
They bring us our livestock, and they bring us food and game, and this is the only species on the planet that can be bothered to bring us stuff and bothered to tell us what they know.
I mean you can ask a camel or a bear, or you can ask your cat, and you get nothing.
(Laughter) But dogs love telling you what they know.
And the ones that really really really love this, they are over the top, they have this unbelievable energy, just unrelenting go and drive.
And we categorize that often as just a reject dog.
It is just too much, it's destructive, it's all of these things.
But those are the characteristics I like to work with in dogs.
Inability to quit: it's not even a desire, it's an inability to quit, It's what resilience is.
For a dog that doesn't stop, you can train that dog to do lots of things and bring you information.
I'd like to tell you a little bit about this particular dog, his name is Ruger.
And he's a really bad dog.
He is the first anti-poaching dog in Zambia, lives right next to a national park where animals are being poached and snared and trafficked out of the park, and even, you know, elephant ivory from the Congo Basin is moving through Tanzania and through Zambia out to ports to be shipped abroad.
And this dog is trained to find ivory and rhino horn, bush meat, other wild life contraband and guns and ammunition.
I trained him, and I found him to be a horrible dog.
He bit and snapped at people, he was scary to approach, he was everything you fear in a dog, and it turns out he was going blind.
So I take this dog to Zambia, and I pair him with these scouts who don't have any history of having pets or being with dogs except throwing rocks at village dogs.
And they learned to think of this dog as a colleague.
And after four months of intensive training with dogs, they started setting up roadblocks and looking for illegal contraband being trafficked in vehicles along the roads outside this park.
And they checked vehicles, and by a human doing it, it can take hours, especially for a bus loaded with luggage and food, like this one up in the top corner.
And Ruger just checked it in a few minutes as this is their first practice training on a roadblock.
And he alerted, which means he sat, and he stared at his handler, and the handler was like, "Oh, dear!"
They searched it, looked through it, and they found nothing, and so their spirits dropped.
But they unloaded that minivan, and they have luggage out, and again Ruger picked a piece of luggage and he sat, and they searched through it and found nothing.
And Ruger insisted, and they went back, and then Ruger hit on a tiny matchbox wrapped in a plastic bag inside clothes.
And inside that matchbox was a primer cap, which is an illegal firing pin for a handmade rifle.
And so everyone, all the passengers on that bus, all the scouts, they suddenly believed.
They believed that Ruger knew what he was doing because he didn't quit.
He has an even more interesting backstory.
He came off of an Indian reservation, the Blackfeet Reservation in Montana.
And he was a horrible puppy, and the owner of this litter shot all of the dogs.
Somehow Ruger escaped, he ended up in a shelter in Helena.
Someone found him and noticed how bad he was and brought him to us to be trained as a conservation detection dog.
He has made a huge difference.
Because of his unrelenting energy and desire to work and love of work, he brings us amazing information.
Then there is another dog I'd like you to meet.
His name is Pepin, and he is with our executive, Dr. Pete Coppolillo, who is going to tell you a little bit more, and I'm going to work Pepin for you.
PC: Well, Megan, Pepin get ready.
I'll give you a little update on Ruger.
The four months after he made his first find in the minibus, he detected and the scouts he works with confiscated 15 guns.
Mostly homemade muzzleloaders, which are their gun of preference for elephant poaching.
They're also used because guns are hard to come by in Africa, by sometimes seven, sometimes 10, sometimes more different poachers.
So, as of now, there may be 100-150 different poachers who are out of business thanks to Ruger.
(Applause) (Cheers) And for these exceptional, really high-drive dogs, you know, Ruger is really the rule rather than the exception.
And I'll tell you about a couple more.
This is Seamus.
Seamus is trained to detect dyer’s woad, which is the weed that's in that pot there.
And speaking of resilience, dyer’s woad drops between 12,000 and 15,000 seeds a year.
So it's a noxious weed, and when it gets established, it's very hard to get rid of.
So people were working on getting rid of it on Mount Sentinel in Missoula for about 10 years, and they weren't making any progress.
So in 2011, we brought in Seamus.
And Seamus is able to do something that we human searchers can't, which is find it by smell before it flowers.
Seamus has knocked back dyer’s woad by over 95 percent.
Thanks to him, we're going to do something that was unthinkable just a few years ago, which is eradicate a noxious weed, a bad infestation of a noxious weed.
And this is Wicket.
Wicket is one of the best stories.
She was in a shelter in Anaconda, Montana, and when we came to get her, the director of the shelter said, "You don't want that dog.
That dog is crazy."
(Laughter) And now Aimee famously said, "I think she might be the right kind of crazy."
Wicket is now the most accomplished conservation detection dog in the world.
She's worked on three continents, she's worked in dozens of US states, and here she is searching a boat for zebra mussels which have a microscopic larval stage that we can't see.
Speaking of accomplished and crazy, (Laughter) now you guys will get to watch Pepin do his thing.
So Meg's put his vest on.
That is his signal that it's time to work.
You can see he's low-focused.
(Laughter) He is ready to go.
So I hid ivory.
I hid some ivory in the room.
Pepin is one of the ivory dogs, and I hid some ivory in the room.
You, guys, just stay put.
He's also not trained on narcotics, so no one has to make a run, (Laughter) for the door or anything like that, and when Meg tells him to go, he'll do his thing.
So what you're going to see is you're going to see him work, and you can watch his head, he'll move his head up and down, it's a little hard indoors because there's not much air moving around in here.
But he'll search, and you may see him whip around, change directions, his alert is something we call "passive alert."
He sits.
And the reason he does that is because we have him trained not to disturb the samples.
Sometimes it's a crime scene, so they want to collect evidence.
Sometimes we collect scats for DNA or things like that.
Normally, he works in big open places.
He is trained on grizzly bear, he is trained on wolverine, so he runs on big, high meadows and pastures, but he's also trained on containers, vehicles and buildings.
And he's checking there.
You see he's got scent now.
There he goes.
Good job, pal!
That's his alert.
And she has a command that is, "Show me!"
And he'll show where it is.
So that's a broken ivory tusk.
(Applause) Well done.
Thank you!
(Applause)