Tortoise-sniffing dog is doing her bit for conservation

Brin the two-year-old Malinois (Belgian shepherd) is helping to save a critically endangered South African tortoise. The geometric tortoise (Psammobates geometricus) is South Africa’s most endangered terrestrial tortoise and the status of this species was recently upgraded to critically endangered, according to the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN). It is now the third most endangered land tortoise in the world, and has been listed as one of the top 100 most threatened species on earth.

The species is found in the Cape lowlands and is mainly threatened by habitat destruction and fragmentation, frequent fires, alien vegetation encroachment, and a probable increase in predation pressure. “In order to monitor and conserve this species, conservationists must have vital information about the size of the population and its presence or absence in suitable habitat,” explained CapeNature spokesman Justin Lawrence. “Getting this type of information requires many, many man hours and this is a limiting factor when gathering data about this species.”

Lawrence said cryptic coloration and the sedentary behavior of the tortoise created problems when conducting counts. “They are incredibly difficult to spot from a visual perspective,” he said. In the United States, the use of conservation detection dogs had been demonstrated to be safe, effective and cost efficient. Dogs were investigated for use as an alternative to humans who were limited to visual clues for finding tortoises. The dogs use their sense of smell to detect geometric tortoises in their natural environment. Presently in South Africa there is one dog handler team conducting field work in the Western Cape.

Brin was trained over six months by CapeNature’s ecological coordinator Vicki Hudson. “Brin loves her ball more than anything else in the world, even food,” said Lawrence. “This is her reward for sniffing out tortoises and she is happy to do this over and over again at any time or place.” Since its implementation, the team has successfully carried out search and rescues, presence/absence surveys, species diversity surveys, and total population estimates. Despite being a new field, Lawrence said it was highly specialized and required distinctive skills to be successful.