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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?
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We compared the efficiency of approved carcass detection dog equipages (CDEs, i.e., dog and man) with people searching for sheep carcasses without dogs.
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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.
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The training program for CDEs in Norway is now adjusted to improve the quality of the equipages.
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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.
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In the future carcass detection dogs in Norway could be used for wildlife conservation and management tasks.
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1 November 2021
Efficiency of Livestock Carcass Detection Dogs
Inger Hansen,
Erlend Winje
Rangelands
Vol. 43 • No. 5
October 2021
Vol. 43 • No. 5
October 2021
cadaver
Efficiency
predation
rangeland
sheep losses
sniffing dogs