Barley the conservation detection dog and his work in the U.S. and Latin America

Barley is a hugely talented 10 year old Border Collie, who works as a conservation detection dog on projects in the U.S. and Latin America.  

Barley has travelled all over national parks in the United States as well as Guatemala in the course of a varied and glittering career to date. He has trained and worked on 16 separate plant and animal scents, from zebra mussels to ocelots and other wildcats. 

And there's more on the horizon for Barley, who will be adventuring in 2024 with his owner and handler to Alaska’s remotest islands to study wolves, as well as travelling to El Salvador, where his olfactory superpowers will be used to identify any evidence of puma activity (pumas were declared extinct in El Salvador in the 1940s, but have been spotted in the last five years).

Barley's owner Kayla Fratt is an ecologist, dog behaviourist and founder of the U.S. based non-profit, K9 Conservationists. Kayla is currently studying for her PhD at Oregon State University, and canine conservation detection is a significant part of her PhD. A recipient of the prestigious U.S. National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship, Kayla is highly knowledgeable, in love with her work and a lively and fun interviewee in a wide ranging conversation with host Kate Fairweather.

The use of conservation dogs is highly evolved in the U.S. so this is a great episode to listen to for an overview of dogs' contribution to conservation work. As part of field trials, dogs collect valuable data, enhancing our understanding of different species' population, behaviour and movement (migration), including those of endangered species.  Such data can, in turn, feed into understanding the bigger picture - how temperature changes are likely to affect biodiversity, for example. 

More information on the work of K9 conservationists, including their 18 week course on training conservation detection dogs.

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• Nica, Nettle and Phoenix, the Japanese knotweed detection dogs

Do you work your dog or dogs?

Please get in touch with Kate Fairweather on [e-mail] to suggest a topic, interviewee or with any feedback - I love to hear from you!  You can find more photos etc at shineradio.uk/dogswithjobs

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