Dogs Being Trained to Find Burmese Pythons in the Everglades
Posted on April 4, 2012
Burmese pythons have become a major pest and are consuming wildlife in the Everglades National Park. Auburn University trained detection dogs from its EcoDog program to be able to locate the snakes. One of the dogs found 19 pythons on its first day in the field. There are estimated to be as many as 100,000 pythons in the Everglades, so even though this method is an effective way of finding the snakes, it could take a long time to find them all.
DR. Christina Romagosa of Auburn University says, "It's really hard for people to find snakes. We've been doing this for several years, trying to find the snakes, and it's really hard to do. They're very cryptic. They're under your feet. You could be standing on top of them and you don't know. It was just amazing. We could be standing there, the dog is telling us that the snake is there and we don't know that. We have to dig to see if we can find it." Take a look:
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