Click below to listen to my 2 min. Garden Bite radio show: Dogs and their amazing noses
You might wonder what dogs and their noses have to do with a gardening show… I’ve talked before about how dogs are being used to sniff out the invasive insect Emerald Ash Borer.
It’s amazing as forestry services and universities are delving even further into what dogs are capable of. They can detect the insect well before humans know it’s there. That means treatment can happen much more quickly. It also means these dogs can be used at points of entry into the U.S. and get the bug stopped before it makes an unwelcome entry into our ash trees. Further study continues. Today, EAB infestations have been detected in 35 states. Biosecurity – invasives.
As I was doing my own research, one of the first things to pop up was that the Miami Airport just unleashed coronavirus sniffing dogs on September 9th. The Washington Post reports that Airport employees will be screened by the dogs. This is not happening for passengers yet.
The dogs, Cobra and One Betta, will spend their shifts sniffing the face coverings of employees passing through a checkpoint to detect the presence of the virus in sweat, breath and scents due to metabolic changes that the virus causes in the human body. If a dog signals the odor of the virus on a person, that individual will be asked to take a rapid coronavirus test. Nature just astounds me all the time.
