We work with wildlife – rare and endangered wildlife. These are the species about which little is known, either because there are too few left or their role in our shared ecosystems is not well understood. Within an ever-changing world of development, these species are disappearing before our eyes oftentimes unknown even to science.

What does this have to do with serving the underserved? Many peoples around the world face devasting living situations with lack of access to medical, educational, and sanitary standards. We believe that learning about underserved and dwindling wildlife species is the key to also protecting and preserving cultures and peoples. It’s by serving the voiceless wildlife community that we feel we can best give back to underserved human communities, too. How? To take a page from the United Nations Sustainability Development Goals, by researching wildlife, we “promote prosperity while protecting the planet.” These goals “recognize that ending poverty must go hand-in-hand with strategies that build economic growth and address a range of social needs including education, health, social protection, and job opportunities, while tackling climate change and environmental protection” (https://www.un.org/sustainabledevelopment/).

It takes a diverse community working together across all fronts to obtain these goals. We’re doing this in a creative way and serving another underserved community: rescue dogs. We study our planet’s incredible biodiversity, everything from tiny butterfly larvae, endangered foxes, and elusive predators such as mountain lions and wolves, alongside the underdogs of the shelter world to fulfill our mission.

We adopt the “unadoptable,” the supposedly “too much” dogs who have extreme energy and an obsessive need to play fetch & we harness this need to locate data on wildlife. For every odor our dog’s noses lead us to they are rewarded with their favorite game: ball! When these intense dogs are given an outlet for their needs they transform like the tiny caterpillars they detect, into environmental service dogs who provide a necessary and noninvasive methodology to research our wild places and spaces.

The information our rescue dogs detect answer questions about the overall health of an ecosystem. If an ecosystem is healthy, that means that air, water, and soil quality is healthy too- which ultimately sustains healthy human populations too. By assisting in conservation science, our wildlife detection dogs are lending a paw to communities large and small everywhere. We face the daunting task of balancing sustainable economic growth with wildland conservation and slowly but surely, our dogs are bringing hope with every sniff they make to the next generation of scientists, biologists, and conservationists.

I am a field biologist and conservation detection dog handler, or bounder, as we call our canine handlers. Bound to the dogs we work alongside, the environments we work in, and bound towards developing this method sustainably and ethically for utilization around the world. I have been working in this specialized niche field for 15+ years. It all started when I met a rescue dog, a blue heeler, named Max. I had been studying endangered northern spotted owls, a keystone species, when an opportunity to work with detection dogs to locate owl pellets fell into my lap.

Max was like me, quiet and shy but also loyal and playful and we became bound to one another. He launched me into my current career in noninvasive wildlife conservation working alongside shelter dogs.

For many years, I wandered the globe working with dogs, including Max and my other soulmate, Scooby, to help researchers locate data on elusive species. With Max, Scooby and other K9 partners by my side, we traveled to Cambodia, Nepal, Vietnam, Africa, and throughout the US and Canada to seek information on species as diverse as tigers, orcas, caterpillars, turtles, and even bumble bee nests. In 2019, after receiving a devastating diagnosis that Max had terminal cancer, myself and my partner, Heath Smith founded the Rogue Detection Teams to continue this mission, and everything that Max taught and our other canine cowoofers taught us in their lives.

Our clients and partners are well-known NGOs, to small private land conservancies, Universities to state and government agencies who require a methodology to collect data on cryptic species in the wild noninvasively. We never need to see, dart, or collar the wildlife our dogs sniff for which can be stressful to the animal as well as expensive to fund.

We are tasked with locating everything from scat, or dung, because this product holds a plethora of information on an individual analyzed by geneticists: sex, reproductive status, stress hormones, diet, and more. Our dogs also locate live animals like invasive iguanas, endangered turtle nests, invisible viruses affecting plants, rare plants, and mortality events at clean energy wind facility sites. The sky is the limit with conservation detection dogs but this field faces many challenges. The first and foremost is funding. This is an underfunded field. Additionally, while our high-drive dogs are critical to the success of this method, so too is paring them alongside a skilled human counterpart, one who can communicate with another species, a conservation dog, for ethical wildlife surveys. It can take years to learn how to appropriately work alongside a detection dog for wildlife research. As such, part of our operations focuses on being a resource to our field. We attend seminars, give workshops, speak at conferences, and host classes for aspiring detection dog handlers. If I can pinpoint what I am most proud of, though, it would be that we advocate and adopt rescue dogs.

These dogs teach us humility, patience, and the meaning of unconditional love. From being the discarded, rejected, and often “unadoptable” dogs of shelters, the biggest source of my joy in working in this challenging field is knowing that we have the opportunity to change the lives of these dogs.

We founded our small conservation detection dog program in 2019, on the cusp of the COVID-19 pandemic. Starting a new business, especially in this niche field (conservation detection dogs? Most people have never heard of this!) and at this particular time was incredibly daunting. If I could have told my younger self that one day I would be the co-founder and co-director of a conservation organization I would not have believed it. I had no aspirations to launch a business and respected the intricacies, skills and expertise of the individuals who work in business to keep companies operational. Honestly, I had no business (pun intended) to start a business but having conducted work in this field for my entire career prior to starting Rogues (15+ years), I believed our mission (adopting shelter dogs to assist wildlife conservation initiatives) was too important to let go. Myself and business partner, Heath Smith, faced two options: walk away or continue our work in a field we loved and believed in. We chose the latter.

It was one of the hardest decisions of my life and at times I can honestly say I regret it. Owning and operating a business is hard, all-consuming, and overwhelming to learn the complexities of maintaining operations. Ultimately though, it’s the mission that drives us forward: knowing that for every dog we adopt into this career, and for every wildlife species our detection teams lend a sniff for, it matters to them. We are giving back in the one small way we know how to, for our shared communities and environments.

In wildlife biology and being a conservation detection dog handler, we are never done learning. It is the basis of our work in science. When we launched Rogue Detection Teams we felt we had many tools of the needed to operate a successful program. Previously, we had been instrumental in the success and development of another well-known conservation dog program. What we did not know at the time is that it is not just passion, dedication, and a beautiful mission to build a successful organization.

We knew that becoming independent would be the hardest thing we would ever do, but we thought that our hard work ethic and desire to give back would carry us through. In this, we were sadly wrong. I needed to unlearn what I thought I knew and do the hard work behind the scenes to keep our idea afloat. If we were going to do this the right way no one was going to hold our hand or give us a paw up. Passion isn’t enough and that was a tough lesson to unlearn.