BOZEMAN, Mont. Ñ There’s a new soldier in Montana’s war against noxious weeds: a dog named Knapweed Nightmare.
With its black and brown coat, perky ears and lolling pink tongue, Nightmare looks like an ordinary family pet. But it’s a professionally trained work dog with a single-minded goal: sniffing out knapweed.
Scent detection dogs are used widely across the world, searching for everything from narcotics to land mines to lost children. But Kim Goodwin, a rangeland noxious weed project specialist at Montana State University in Bozeman, thinks Knapweed Nightmare may be the only dog that is trained to detect noxious weeds.
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These weeds displace native plants and animals and can permanently damage ecosystems. Spotted knapweed alone has a $46 million annual impact on Montana cattle producers. Weeds also affect fish and wildlife habitat, which in turn hurts the recreation and tourism industries.
Goodwin said most of Montana is knapweed-free, but many areas are seriously threatened by weed spread, which occurs at a rate of up to 20 percent each year.
Nightmare is undergoing rigorous training with Hal Stiner of Rocky Mountain Command Dogs in Belgrade, Mont. Once the dog completes the training and passes a series of ever-more-difficult performance tests, it will move to eastern or central Montana. There, it will be unleashed on 10-acre parcels of rangeland, where it will systematically search until it locates a knapweed odour or has covered enough of the grid that its handlers can determine no knapweed is present.
When Nightmare follows a knapweed odour to an actual plant, it will dig or claw at the plant for about 10 seconds and then continue its search. A global positioning system flash card on Nightmare’s collar will log its location every three seconds so that if it pauses to dig, land managers know to check GPS co-ordinates for knapweed.
Goodwin said the trick to keeping areas free of knapweed is to find small outbreaks before they turn into major problems, but that isn’t easy.
“The weak link in rapid response to new weeds is early detection.”
Finding low-density knapweed in a 100-acre pasture is like finding a needle in a haystack and it is particularly challenging to look for something that may not be there, Goodwin said. Human searchers move slowly, become tired, hot and bored and quickly lose motivation.
“When we use people to sample a low-weed density area, they’re too expensive and they don’t find all of the weeds. For every plant we find, there may be nine others we don’t find.”
More sophisticated technologies such as satellite imaging can’t provide enough detail to spot a single plant.
“We also try to narrow our search efforts to likely or predictable sites, but weeds are moving erratically and establishing in unlikely areas. They’re unpredictable.”
That’s where detection dogs come in. Goodwin knew that the U.S. Department of Agriculture was using dogs to search for illegally imported plants and exotic animals at points of entry, so she wondered, why not give dogs a try on noxious weed detection?
“We’re applying old technology to a new problem.”
Goodwin said she was fortunate to find Stiner’s business close to MSU.
“I contacted Hal with this silly idea and he didn’t laugh,” she said.
It takes considerable time to teach a dog to find a particular scent, Stiner said, and training begins soon after birth with scent imprinting.
From the time a professional working dog is born, it never plays the way a family pet might. Instead, a dog in training plays with an object bathed in the scent it’s learning to detect. Handlers praise the dog when it reacts positively to the scent.
“We use praise to positively reinforce and we’re focusing Nightmare’s aggression not on a person but on knapweed,” Stiner said.
Knapweed Nightmare’s “toy” is a piece of knapweed wrapped inside a towel and it has begun to associate the scent with pleasure and praise.
Stiner has been hiding the knapweed toy in progressively harder spots and Nightmare seeks it methodically by scent. As it becomes more proficient, the hiding places will get tougher and search area larger.
“We make the hiding harder and harder,” Stiner said. “She gets more devoted to her work through this process.”
When Knapweed Nightmare has convinced Stiner and Goodwin that its ready, the dog will begin field testing, where a successful outing could mean great potential for weed detection and prevention in Montana.
“If this works, we’ll have another alternative to maintaining weed-free areas from weed spread using teams of detector dogs,” Goodwin said.
Stiner owns Knapweed Nightmare, but will contract out the dog’s work to MSU.
Goodwin said she may eventually experiment to see whether a dog can differentiate between different types of knapweed.
