The four-legged pets trained to sniff out some damaging and invasive pests. That’s coming up on This Land of Ours.
PPQ Expands Its Detector Dog Team
USDA/APHIS imagePPQ’s Officers/Canine Handlers Jennifer Taylor (left), with detector dog Boe, and Josh Moose, with detector dog Rudey, take a break from training. They pose for a team shot in a training lot at PPQ’s National Detector Dog Training Center in Newnan, GA.
USDA/APHIS imagePPQ-Trained Detector Dogs Track Down Lanternflies and Beetles
Detector dog Bradley takes a break from looking for Japanese beetle larvae at the Oregon Zoo.
USDA/APHIS image
They may be man’s best friend but they’re also angling to be Agriculture’s best friend. Detector Canines, trained by the USDA’s PPQ program, are learning how to spot and stop spotted Lanternflies and Japanese beetles before it’s too late. These highly trained dogs represent some of the recent successes of the Agricultural Detector Canines strategic initiative. Its goal is to expand the use of detector dogs to enhance domestic pest surveys, detect pests early, and facilitate the trade of U.S. agricultural products.
The North Carolina Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services wants to use PPQ-trained detector dogs to keep the spotted lantern fly out of the state.
In Oregon, PPQ set up a collaborative pilot project with the Oregon Department of Agriculture to assess the effectiveness of detector dogs in finding JB larvae.
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