Spaniels are more than just pretty dogs. They can also be valuable to efforts and programs that are designed to save other animals. And this is what the Spaniels of a man named John Rucker are doing.
John Rucker, who has the moniker Turtle Whisperer, and his seven Boykin Spaniels have been enlisted by the Saint Louis Zoo to survey its shelled reptiles. Interested in what John and his pups are actually doing? Read this super team’s story below:
Checking out the box turtles
The Saint Louis Zoo reached out to John after hearing about him from people of the University of Illinois’ wildlife epidemiology department. John was tasked to survey the zoo’s new 425-acre park.
Dr. Sharon Deem, one of the directors of the Saint Louis Zoo, explained she and her team were studying a disease called ranavirus. The said virus, apparently, caused mortality among box turtles And it just happened that ranavirus was tracked in the zoo’s aquatic turtles.
John and his dogs were to find 10 box turtles at the beginning of each season, so the zoo could place telemetry devices on these reptiles. For this particular study, John trained his dogs to look for the box turtles through their scent.
The importance of conserving turtles
Dr. Deem said that conserving box turtles was such an important task. For one, these small reptiles helped with the maintenance of environmental health by becoming either predators or prey. They might also add nutrients to the soil whenever they laid their eggs.
And while finding the turtles could have been accomplished by humans, the tasks might take some weeks since humans rely heavily on their eyes when searching. With John’s Spaniels, though, the search would take a few hours, as dogs are equipped with a powerful sense of smell.
The dogs are specifically designed for this task. To give you a perspective, experts say that dogs’ sense of smell could be between about 100,000 times surely more powerful than that of humans.
Video Source: FOX 2 St. Louis via YouTube