A dog may help save the whales
We’ve mentioned Tucker, the whale-poop tracking dog, before. Now Tucker’s fame has spread to the New York Times: Tracking a Subtle Scent, a Dog May Help Save the Whales.
A dog named Tucker with a thumping tail and a mysterious past as a stray on the streets of Seattle has become an unexpected star in the realm of canine-assisted science. He is the world’s only working dog, marine biologists say, able to find and track the scent of orca scat, or feces, in open ocean water — up to a mile away, in the smallest of specks.
Through dint of hard work and obsession with an orange ball on a rope, which he gets to play with as a reward after a successful search on the water, Tucker is an ace in finding something that most people, and perhaps most dogs, would just as soon avoid. [continue]
My dog would be a fantastic whale-poop tracker, but there’s no way she’d accept a ball as payment. No, it’d have to be steak or something really yummy.
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