Will dogs sniff out social rank? The use of detection dog in dominant breeder wolf scat identification

The use of conservation dogs is rapidly increasing. These canine units usually are employed to discriminate target species odor from non-target ones to monitor or aid in the conservation of species. Although the ability of dogs to identify individuals from the odor of fecal samples is well known, there are no studies investigating the ability of dogs to identify social status through feces. Therefore, we conducted a case study to test the effectiveness of a dog in identifying the feces of dominant breeder wolves and ignoring those of nonbreeder adults, subadults, and pups. The dog was trained using a multiple-choice carousel in a training/testing protocol. We showed that training on three different dominant breeder subjects enabled the dog to identify all the dominant breeder individuals used in the study, indicating rapid generalization of the dog and an ability to train the odor concept. The dog's ability to identify only dominant breeder individuals allows researchers to optimize sample collection in the field for estimating population size by non-invasive genetic analysis and reducing costs.