By Hoag Levins & Suzanne Levy ... | ...Jan. 00, 2011

PHILADELPHIA -- When you first hear it, the idea of training dogs to track wild animal excrement seems silly, perhaps even absurdly so. But the more you learn, the clearer it becomes

Photo: Hoag Levins

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Philadelphia Zoo Curator of Small Mammals Christine Bartos trained "Finn" to track the scent of Cheetah excrement. Click photos for larger image.

that canine "scat" sniffing plays an increasingly critical role in saving some of the planet's most endangered animals.

And that makes it all the more noteworthy that the Philadelphia Zoo is responsible for training Africa's only cheetah-poop tracking dog. That border collie, named Finn, is now on location in Namibia with the Cheetah Conservation Fund, helping to collect data about the world's fastest land animal.

Despite their ability to run as fast as 70 miles an hour, cheetahs haven't been able to outdistance the high-powered rifles that have killed them by the tens of thousands throughout Africa. It's estimated that by the late 1980s, 70 percent of the world's cheetah population had been wiped out. The largest number remained in Namibia where livestock farmers continued the relentless slaughter.

Cheetah Conservation Fund
In 1990, world-renowned cheetah expert Dr. Laurie Marker moved to Namibia, launched the nonprofit Cheetah Conservation Fund (CCF) and began research aimed at protecting the big cats. But elusive wild cheetahs are very difficult to study up close. So like other wildlife scientists Marker and her CCF crew began analyzing cheetah excrement, or "scat."

Photo: Christine Bartos

In the Namibian bush, Finn the scat dog sits while three Earth Watch volunteers retrieve the cheetah excrement he's found.

But tracking down enough of that fecal matter in the bush was also a difficult task.

In 2004, during a visit to the Philadelphia Zoo, Marker mentioned that she was searching for someone to train a dog to track cheetah scat. Zoo Curator of Ungulates and Small Mammals Christine Bartos had longed trained scent-tracking show dogs. The two women struck up a friendship that ultimately resulted in the Zoo and CFF co-funding a "scat dog" training project.

The challenge was very different from the dogs Bartos had trained to follow ground scents. This dog would have to "scan" the air, pick up a scent of cheetah excrement and then follow it across terrain where many other animals had defecated.

"I know it may sound too difficult for a dog to do," said Bartos. "But very few people fully appreciate how amazing dogs' sense of smell really is."

Local cheetah poop
The first order of business was finding a dog and a supply of cheetah excrement. The eight-week-old dog -- Finn -- was provided by the nonprofit Mid Atlantic Border Collie Rescue. The poop came from cheetah cages at the Philadelphia and Baltimore zoos. And to keep it fresh, Bartos stored it in the freezer compartment of her home refrigerator.

"I labeled the containers 'Cheetah Scat' and made sure to tell all my visiting friends not to go into that," she laughed.

Eighteen months of Finn's training took place in a heavily wooded area near Bartos' Williamstown, New Jersey home.

"You start with a little container of cheetah scat. The dog sniffs it out and gets his toy.

Photos: Y. Gupta, H. Levins

Long a supporter of cheetah conservation, the Philadlephia Zoo was the first to successfully breed the cats in captivity in 1956.

You back him up more and more and expand his training and start teaching discrimination with multiple kinds of scat," said Bartos, who also used lion and leopard excrement from the zoo.

The hardest part was teaching Finn not to eat the scat. "Most dogs love eating cat poop," she said. "Dogs also like to roll in cat poop. But that's bad because that would get Finn's DNA on the cheetah scat. So, he was trained to find it but not touch it. He just sits nearby."

For his final training, Bartos flew Finn to the Center for Conservation Biology in Seattle, Wash., which trains scat dogs for wild animal researchers around the world.

And finally, two years ago, Bartos flew Finn to Africa and turned him over to Dr. Marker at the CCF to begin his real work of finding cheetah scat in Namibia.

DNA lab for cheetah scat
Using that scat and its own DNA lab, CCF can identify the exact cheetah, estimate its range, document its relationship to other cheetahs, quantify the overall population and even use hormones to study a cat's stress level.

Fecal content also reveals a cheetah's exact diet. And this may be one of the most important aspects of research in a land whose farmers kill cheetahs on sight on the assumption that all eat domestic livestock. One recent study notes that on average, 19 cheetahs were being killed per farm per year throughout one Namibian province.

But scat analysis documented that 95 percent of the diet of that province's cheetahs consisted of wild game; only 5 percent included domesticated farm animals.

Those scat-driven scientific findings are now being used in a Namibian program to educate farmers about why it's not necessary to kill every cheetah they see in a country that has only 3,000 left.

And Finn is Philadelphia Zoo's contribution to that effort. "He's doing a great job out there now," said Bartos, who gets regular email and photo reports from Namibia about her beloved canine student. "He's increasing the amount of information they have on cheetahs and he has many, many years of work ahead of him."