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" rehley was emaciated and frenetic when we found him at 

 the local animal shelter. His former owner, unable to handle 

 his boundless energy, had kept him locked in a crate in a 

 tiny apartment — no place for a border collie. With no outlet 

 for his insatiable urge to play, Frehley would chase his own 

 paws in circles to the point of exhaustion. It took Heath 

 Smith, the lead dog trainer in my program, half an hour 

 to get Frehley to stop whirling long enough to even notice 

 the ball he'd brought. Such neurotic behavior puts off most would-be 

 pet owners, and the dog might well have wound up euthanized like 

 so many others of his kind. Fortunately for Frehley, we recognized 

 in him the single-minded drive of a born conservation canine. 



Once Frehley was in our care at the Center for Conservation 

 Biology (CCB) at the University of Washington in Seattle, it didn't 

 take long to redirect his obsession with his paws into an obsession 

 with playing fetch. A few months of training, confidence build- 

 ing, and gentle encouragement transformed him into a top-notch 

 detection dog with a remarkable new skill: the ability to locate scat 

 from a variety of endangered species over vast wilderness areas. And 

 all for the simple reward of a favorite ball. Frehley and our team of 

 dogs like him — professional poop chasers — have entirely changed 

 my program's approach to studying endangered species, from orcas 

 in Puget Sound to giant anteaters in Brazil. 



HUMANKIND'S UNBRIDLED DEMAND for resources is putting im- 

 mense and complex pressures on wildlife. It is urgent to understand 

 those pressures, their scale, and how best to mitigate them. Central 

 to that work is the study of the affected animal populations, and 

 the most common sampling methods include traps, camera traps, 

 hair snags, and radio-telemetry tags. But those methods all suffer 

 from collection bias: samples are more readily collected from some 

 individuals than others, so the data they provide is incomplete at 

 best. Trapping and tagging can also be expensive, and disruptive or 

 even dangerous to the very animals the studies intend to help. 



In the mid-1980s, my program, the CCB, began developing 

 methods for studying wildlife populations in a safe and noninvasive 



natural history October 2008 



Tucker strains a 

 of orca scat nea 

 (background), b 

 when the scent 

 methods for stu 

 which trained di 



