Meet Maritimes' first bed bug sniffing dog
Published Thursday November 26th, 2009
Ekko hunts down the little critters humans can't find
There are bomb-sniffing dogs and drug-sniffing dogs and dogs who can sniff out those in need of rescue, and then there's Ekko.
The two-year-old Parson Russell terrier also has a sniffing specialty, but Ekko's forte is a bit unusual: he's the Martimes' first bed bug sniffing dog.
Ekko's owner, Andrew Farago, operates Scentdogs, a privately owned K-9 detection service in Berry Mills. Farago has two drug-detection dogs and often works with dog trainer Bill Grimmer, who has a bomb-sniffing dog. Two years ago they were chatting about the fact that there is not a lot of call for drug sniffing dogs in the private sector.
"He (Grimmer) said there is all kinds of stuff out there, and the big one now is bed bugs," Farago says.
So Farago went on the hunt for a new dog to train. He acquired Ekko when he was just 10 weeks old and began teaching him to snoop out the pesky little critters.
"Everything has an odour, so if you can train the dog to look for that odour, the dog will find it. You can train a dog to find anything," he says.
But first he had to get Ekko to know the odour of bed bugs, so he approached a local pest control company to get a live batch.
"I've got bed bugs here now and I have to feed them," he says. "If they get out, I might as well get a divorce."
When Ekko smells the bugs, he begins scratching at whatever it is the bed bugs are on or in. Farago notes where Ekko has indicated, takes the dog out of the room, then comes back a little while later.
"If he gives me the indication in the same place, then we can probably be 100 per cent certain there are bed bugs there," he says.
Farago says introducing the scent is not the hard part -- teaching the dog where to look for the scent, in this case along baseboards, around doors and cupboards, under the bed and behind headboards and pictures, is what is tough.
Farago would put the bed bugs in a little vial with a screen to keep them from escaping, hide it in a room and then bring Ekko in to find it.
He says Ekko has had about 800 hours of training to get to this point.
"He is now a full-fledged certified bedbug detection dog."
Farago expects hotels will be his biggest clients.
Although he says Moncton hasn't had too much trouble with bed bugs thus far, we likely won't escape the problems other cities have had for long.
Nazareth House, for example, recently had trouble with a bed bug infestation.
"They travel on us and they travel in our luggage and given the high mobility rate of our society today... people travel back and forth to various countries and bed bugs are, essentially, hitchhikers," he says.
A female bed bug can lay one to five eggs every day and lives for seven to eight months, which, at the most conservative, is more than 200 eggs over her lifetime, not counting her grandchildren and great-grandchildren and so on.
Farago says the eggs are so tiny they are difficult to see with the naked eye and they are almost always somewhere very well hidden, like behind the baseboard heater.
"If you see five bed bugs, then there are probably 50 you can't see," he says. "But they can't hide from a dog. The dog can smell them out even behind the drywall."
Farago thinks dogs with training like Ekko's could be a real help to the pest control industry.
He was recently at a Canadian Pest Management Association conference which had a three-hour presentation on bed bugs. In one case, a pest control specialist took nine hours to go through a three-bedroom bungalow searching for the little crawlies.
"That was sort of a shock to me," Farago says. "(They asked), 'How long would it take you with your dog?' I said, 'About 15 minutes. Twenty if he is having a bad day.' And I would be willing to bet (the pest control people) wouldn't find more than half. That is where the dogs come in. This little guy is amazing."
Farago says to his knowledge there are only about half a dozen dogs in the country that are trained to sniff out bed bugs, though he knows of others being trained in P.E.I. and Nova Scotia.
"It's a growth industry for sure. Unfortunately for a lot of people, these guys are not going away," he says.
Farago says Ekko's ability isn't even all that well known yet and he still gets one to two calls a week asking for his services.
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