Efficiency of livestock carcass detection dogs

Abstract

There is an increasing use of carcass detection dogs to find remains of dead livestock in Norwegian rangelands. But how effective are these dogs actually? We compared the efficiency of approved carcass detection dog equipages (CDEs, i.e., dog and man) with people searching for sheep carcasses without dogs. CDEs found significantly more carcasses than people without dogs, and kilometers traveled and minutes spent per carcass detection indicated that dogs were >3x as effective in their search. However, CDEs found only 1 in 4 of the carcasses laid out experimentally. The training program for CDEs in Norway is now adjusted to improve the quality of the equipages. The effort of sheep CDEs is important to Norwegian sheep farmers applying for compensation because of the increase in percentage of proven losses caused by protected carnivores. In the future carcass detection dogs in Norway could be used for wildlife conservation and management tasks.