A Dog's Nose Knows
William McShea has been stalking the moon bear in China's Sichuan Province for nine years. The moon, or Asiatic, bear is threatened by poaching and deforestation, and populations are isolated in reserves throughout the region as well as in captivity. McShea, a zoologist at the Smithsonian National Zoological Park, and graduate student Karl Malcolm have a simple question: how stressed out are these bears?
As it turns out, finding a bear's scat is almost as good, data-wise, as finding the bear, with the added benefit of not bothering the bear. Chemical analyses of feces can detect the presence of hormones that reveal an animal's stress level. McShea and Malcolm had been combing the forest floor for bear excrement in earnest, but it was not until they met a dog named Wicket that their bear-tracking shifted into high gear. Dogs, they learned, can locate a specific animal's droppings with virtually 100 percent accuracy.
McShea called Working Dogs for Conservation for help; Wicket and his trainer, Aimee Hurt, responded. They found bear excrement in totally unexpected places, McShea says. Preliminary analyses indicate that bears in captivity are the most perturbed, but there are significant variations in stress levels among bears living in different reserves. The next step: pinpoint the culprit.
