Chapter 20 – Scent-matching Dogs: A New Tool for Identifying Wild Tigers

Publisher Summary Dogs have a long, fruitful association with humans, in part because of their uncanny ability to hunt and find game. This ability is a result of an extremely well evolved sense of smell. Dogs essentially are very sensitive chemo-detectors. Field biologists are just now also taking advantage of canine chemo-detectors to study the biology of wild Amur tigers in their natural environment in the Russian Far East. A variety of pure- or mixed-breed dogs can be used for tiger identification. Dogs need to be healthy, but physical stamina is not a prerequisite because they are not used in the field. To begin scent-matching, it is essential to have a reference collection of scats from different tigers from a known locality. Reference collection is built from individually identified tigers by snow-tracking in geographically distinct areas, or by following tracks of different sexed individuals based on track size in the same area. This prevents the possibility of following tracks of the same tiger twice. Scats are collected by following single sets of tiger tracks in snow and collecting scats only associated with those tracks. Using trained dogs to match scent is a non-invasive and reliable field methodology for identifying individual tigers. Used with mark-recapture surveys to estimate species abundance, scent-matching dogs have the potential to become a significant new tool to study wild tigers and probably other species. In studies where remote infrared cameras, or DNA genotyping is impractical or ineffective, this method may be a more useful option.