On February 11-12, 2025, the Cornell K. Lisa Yang Center for Wildlife Health, the Cornell Richard P. Riney Canine Health Center, and the Cornell Duffield Institute for Animal Behavior welcomed Dr. Pete Coppolillo, Executive Director of Working Dogs for Conservation (WD4C), to Cornell University as a special guest speaker.

During his visit, Coppolillo gave two talks to the Cornell community: “Disease Detection, Discrimination, and Dogs: A Conversation on the Roles of and Challenges Confronting Specially Trained Canines for One Health Work” and “Conservation Dogs: Pushing Boundaries for Ecological Monitoring, Biosecurity, and Law Enforcement.”

Sniffing Out Solutions

WD4C is a world-renowned nonprofit that transforms rescued dogs into skilled partners in conservation. By training a variety of working breeds, WD4C supports wildlife conservation efforts around the globe, promoting dogs from “man’s best friend” to nature’s greatest ally. The group prides itself on training dogs to help with projects under four pillars: ending wildlife crime around the world, detecting and preventing the spread of invasive species, monitoring threatened and endangered species, and environmental justice.

“A dog’s nose is the best chemical sensor the world has ever known,” Coppolillo said.

The canine olfactory system excels at both detection and discrimination. “A dog’s nose is the best chemical sensor the world has ever known,” Coppolillo said. Remarkably, dogs can detect scent thresholds as low as 1 part per trillion. Dogs are also able to discriminate between two very similar odors, differentiating subspecies of plants based on scent better than human experts, who largely rely on visual differences.

The Benefits of Dogs in Conservation

Traditional wildlife capture for disease surveillance is expensive and can be dangerous for the animal being sampled, with risks such as capture myopathy and anesthetic complications, as well as for the people involved. Coppolillo emphasized the need for safer surveillance methods for both people and wildlife.

That is where canine olfactory superpowers come in: dogs can be trained to detect and alert trainers to a specific scent relevant to a conservation project, whether that’s a specific strain of bacteria, the scat from a particular species, or a species of invasive plant. WD4C is thus able to make disease surveillance safer for both wild animals and conservationists, as well as more efficient. In one study, dogs were shown to be nine times more likely than camera traps to detect a bobcat along a 3.2km transect. In WD4C’s own field trials, a target of interest, such as a wildlife scat, can be detected by dogs up to 600 meters away. Once trained, dogs can find scats in the field, diminishing the need to capture wild animals for sample collection.

Canines and Conservation Efforts for Wild Bighorn Sheep

One of WD4C’s current projects is training dogs to detect specific pathogens via fecal samples from specific wildlife species. Their current pathogen of interest is Mycoplasma ovipneumoniae, a type of bacteria that does not cause serious illness when it infects domestic sheep but which has devastated populations of wild bighorn sheep in the American West.

WD4C has three major goals when using dogs to help conserve bighorn sheep. First, they aim to screen captured bighorn sheep for M. ovipneumoniae in real time by bringing trained dogs to the capture site. Second, they will employ dogs to locate and identify bighorn sheep scats in the field. Finally, they want to help reduce the spread of the pathogen between domestic and wild sheep populations by using working dogs to maintain physical separation.

The Training Process

Coppolillo described the training process for the dogs selected to participate in the bighorn sheep project. During training sessions, dogs are brought into a room with a ‘scent wheel’ presenting six different samples for the dog to sniff. One of the six canisters contains an M. ovipneumoniae-positive fecal sample, while the other five samples are feces from uninfected sheep or other distracting scents. When a dog detects a specimen with M. ovipneumoniae, it alerts trainers.

WD4C now primarily uses olfactometers—automated devices that release one of six scent samples at random for dogs to detect—rather than traditional scent wheels. The olfactometer streamlines training by reducing hands-on labor and minimizing cleanup time, as handlers no longer need to manually switch out scent samples between trials. When a dog correctly identifies the positive sample, he or she sits (and wags excitedly!), nose pressed against a sensor, and a chime sounds to indicate success, followed by a treat or toy reward.

These dedicated dogs train until they reach nearly 100% accuracy in the simulated training environment. Coppolillo mentioned that the first group of dogs is expected to go into the field soon. Their goal will be to detect M. ovipneumoniae in bighorn sheep fecal samples in Nebraska—a big step in making rescued dogs key partners in wildlife disease surveillance. Working dogs are proving to be valuable partners in disease surveillance, and many potential applications remain to be explored.

Coppolillo ended by expressing confidence in the dogs’ abilities. “Dogs are good at a lot of things,” he said, “and they often help in ways we didn’t even anticipate!”

Written by Victoria Priester, DVM ‘26