 show for people who care about their health and the health of our planet on the Think Tech Live Streaming Network series. I'm your host, Dr. Grace O'Neill. Joining me today is Kiyoko Johnson, founder of Conservation Dogs of Hawaii. Welcome, Kiyoko. Thank you for having me. Thank you for being on the show. So tell us about how you started Conservation Dogs of Hawaii. Sure. So about five years ago, I established the nonprofit organization. But prior to that, maybe about five years before that, I was already kind of working in that field. I was training pet dogs in Anuahu to do scent detection. And around that same time, I got hired to train some dogs to look for bird and bat carcasses at the local wind farms. And at that time, I didn't really know what kind of conservation efforts were in place. You know, in Hawaii, I was just a dog trainer. And that experience working at the wind farm taught me a little bit more about the local efforts to save native species. And so I took on a couple more jobs after that, and then decided to start a nonprofit so that we could pursue our own projects instead of just being, you know, hired by companies to do specific projects. So are there a lot of birds and bass that get stuck in these wind farms? They actually don't get stuck. They're more strikes depending on the environmental conditions and then they fall to the ground. So technically, I guess they're down birds and bats. But when I was working at the Kauai Loa Wind Farm, we actually didn't find a lot. I don't know what the overall data is, but the dogs have a very high accuracy of the fines compared to visual searchers. So they were able to give the company and the local environmental agency is like a better idea of what actually is going on. So that's where the dogs are helpful. And it's almost at all times a fatal strike then? I don't know the details of that. You probably want to interview a biologist about that. I'm just a dog person. So tell us, what kind of projects are you working on now? Well, we have a few projects going on. Devilweed is an invasive plant that we've been involved with for the last few years. Several of our dog teams are volunteer community members and they go out into the field with their dogs to look for the plant and then we report our findings to the Oahu Invasive Species Committee. We also have some dog teams that fly to the Big Island to do that work and we work with the Big Island Invasive Species Committee. So invasive plants, we're also training up a bunch of dogs right now for invasive ants. We're partnered with the Hawaii Ant Lab to look for little fire ants which might be infesting potted plants or it could be in construction sites or even residential neighborhoods. And so we're testing the efficacy of the dogs right now to see if we can help with eradication efforts on Oahu and possibly maybe using them at ports of entry and exit in other islands. So with... Yeah. Go ahead. Yeah, go ahead. Oh, I mean, yeah, we have a lot of stuff going on. I don't know if you want me to go through all of them or I could just bring them up later as we continue our discussion. Well, I guess, yeah, we can just bring it up. I did have a question about the fire ants. Like once... if the dogs are able to identify them, what is the plan to get rid of them? Do you have any idea how they're going to get rid of them? Yeah. So the Hawaii Ant Lab and Oahu Invasive Species Committee, they're the ones who focus on Oahu efforts specifically. Each island has their own invasive species committees, but they definitely have a very thought out and tested plan for eradicating ants. It kind of depends on how bad the infestation is on each island, whether it can be completely eradicated or not. But as far as treating specific sites, they have two methods of treating. Some of them are with pesticides and the others are natural, more like birth control for ants that slowly kind of stop the appropriation. But yeah, their website has a lot of good information about that if you'd like to find out more. Thank you. And I was also wondering about the devil weed. How are they eradicating the devil weed once the dogs find the devil weed? Yeah. So again, with all invasive species, eradication is kind of dependent on how bad the infestation is. One of the things that everybody tries to aim for is early detection or prevention using biosecurity so that it's a lot more cost effective and easier to get rid of. Something like devil weed, if you find it in the very early stages, you can literally just pull them out of the ground with your hands. It's not very hard. It's just once it spreads to a point where you can't pull thousands of plants or maybe it's on a steep cliff. It's dangerous to walk down. Then that's where it gets more challenging. So there are researchers who are looking into what's called the bio control for devil weed. And that is a well researched and effective treatment using other species that will target that invasive species devil weed in this instance and get rid of them. It's very interesting. I'm wondering what, so you have a lot of pictures. So let's go through the pictures and tell us about where the dogs are, what you're doing. If you don't mind running the pictures. So this is you and your dog, I'm assuming. Yeah, this is my late dog, Luca. He was my pet dog, not a working dog, but he's the first dog that I learned to do scent detection with for fun. And he loved it. He didn't actually like to swim or play or fetch ball or anything normal. So I was really ecstatic that he liked scent work. And so through him, I kind of decided to share that with other pet dog owners and then moving on to working dogs as well. So with a scent detection, I'm wondering, I mean, I know it's probably more complicated than, you know, just a paragraph or whatever. But how do you get the dogs to recognize a scent? Do you just give it to them? And then like, how do you tempt them to keep on recognizing that particular scent? Like what draws them to that particular scent? How do they know, you know, you just put it in front of them and then they're like, okay, it's this for today. How does that work? Yeah, sure. There's actually a lot of ways to train scent detection dogs. And there's no one right way. It kind of depends on what your needs are, what kind of dog you have. But in general, everybody does use a concept called classical conditioning, which is like Pavlov's dogs, they salivate when they hear the bell because it's associated with their food. So it's a process of associating the target odor or target species with the dog's primary motivator, which is often food or toy. And then sometimes, you know, if you're training a conservation dog to search for like rodents or live bird or something that is innately of value to the dog because you picked the right breed or right dog, then you don't really need an external motivator like food or toy. They can be trained to search for that target just through exposure and focusing their efforts. So with the dogs that do this, can it be any dog? If someone had, you know, a golden retriever, a mutt, it couldn't be any dog that wants that the owner is willing to train the dog or are there specific dogs that are better for the task? Yeah, that's a good question. I would say that just about every dog has the sensing ability, they're able to recognize sense and associate it with their food or whatever. But with working dogs, it requires a lot more than that. So like they need the physical agility or the, you know, desire to seek out their food or toy no matter what the environmental circumstances are. There might be mud and bad weather and it's hot out and they're tired, but they still want to have to find those things and tell the handler about it. So yeah, a lot of it has to do with how motivated they are under different challenging circumstances. But yeah, all dogs can do the sensing part. So often, some of the lower drive dogs I would say are often used for more volunteer projects. For example, we did a melon fly project that's for invasive, you know, fruit flies that attack the zucchinis and other fruits. That study just basically involved the dog sniffing, you know, 10 containers over and over again and telling us which one had the target fruit fly. So it's not physically as strenuous as running around in the field. So in those cases, we were able to get, you know, pet dogs that don't normally do this work involved. That was fun. Oh, that's nice. So you can, if you wanted to volunteer your pet dog, you could volunteer for a project like that. There might be an appropriate project for your pet dog. Yeah, occasionally those projects come up for sure. Yeah. The handler actually has to have some experience too, ideally. Because I think it's often the conception that the dog does all the work, but really it's a partnership and the dog handler has a big part of the role as well. Sure. So how many dogs do you have working as the conservation dogs in Hawaii currently? Let's see. We kind of have a constantly changing lineup of dogs depending on what projects we're working on because they're not all long-term. But right now we have about three or four devil weed dogs and we have two rodent detection or three rodent detection, a couple of ant detection dogs. And some of them are cross-trained to do multiple projects or targets. So I would say we have about 10 dogs in our programs. So the handler, like you said, has to be free that day to take the dog to whatever project they're going to. So is it mostly on weekends where people are not working? Yeah, that depends on the project. For example, our devil weed project on Oahu is a volunteer-based project. So the handlers and dogs go out into the field when they're available. So they kind of dictate the schedule. However, if we were to do a job for the big island invasive species for devil weed, then it's on a stricter schedule. It's an actual higher for higher job. So it would need to be that the dog handler is available for that. And same with some of the other work that we do on the big island, such as seabird nest detection, it's not a volunteer-based job. So it has higher criteria as far as availability goes. So they will pay the dogs to go out and do those jobs on the big island, seabird nesting and other things. Yeah, I would say they pay the dog handler. And then we pay the dogs with food or toys. So with these jobs, you find that is that what you're primarily doing now? You don't do any more dog training? Are you pretty busy just doing these conservation projects? When you say dog training, do you mean training the detection dogs or training pet dogs? I guess training both detection and the pet dogs, whatever you're doing. Yeah, no, we still do a lot of training. I mean, it's not like when you train a detection dog, then they're set forever. There's constant maintenance training involved, like continuing to keep them motivated on the target that we're having them find, practicing different scenarios, because it's not always going to be the same. So exposing them to different environments, it's kind of an ongoing training project, really. Yeah. And then if somebody wanted to train up their dog, would they, they would have to go to, do you train people to do that? Right now, we're not accepting or training green dog teams just because we're such a small organization. We just don't have the resources to do that. So right now, sometimes we recruit dog handler teams from community artwork classes or groups. Sometimes, you know, people come to us who already have experience in search and rescue or something similar. And then we bring them in. But we're kind of working towards trying to get more funding so that we can train green teams, just because, you know, I feel like there's a big need for conservation dog teams in Hawaii. And we want to meet that need. Yeah, that, I mean, there's so much to be done here. I'm wondering, can we run some of the other slides? Sorry, interrupted you in the middle of it. That's another question. So what is this? This is a devil lead detection dog named Ruger. He's a Weimarunner and his handlers behind him. And there's a Coupou intern that accompanied us to, you know, help us pull leads when Ruger found them. So this is on Oahu. Yeah, invasive plant survey. And then go ahead, Michael. This is also a devil lead survey. That's Hamela Roberta on the right with Alcana, the Belgian Malinois. This is on the big island though. And the lady in the bright yellow shirt, she is the field crew lead for big island invasive species. And they detected devil lead on their island more recently. And so we don't know yet how widespread it is, but they hire us, or they have hired us once a year to kind of visit their infestation areas and the surrounding areas to see how much the devil lead has spread or not. Yeah, I'm not really familiar with devil lead. Is there, I guess there's no picture of it there, but is it? Yeah, it's a green, the leaf is green and it kind of has jagged edges. And they call it devil lead because the veins are like a three-pronged kitchen fork like that. Yeah. And then when you tear the leaf, it has a very distinct turpentine-like smell. Ah, yeah. It's toxic to livestock. That's why it's kind of a big deal. I mean, is it toxic to pets to them? It is if they consume large amounts. It's not something that the dogs naturally want to eat, so we don't have to worry about that. But yeah, we definitely want to stop it from spreading to agricultural lands. Okay, so let's go to the next slide. What is this? So this is Solo, the Labrador Retriever, and myself actually serving for invasive yellow crazy ants at Johnston Atoll National Wildlife Refuge. Oh, wow. Yeah, that's an island like way southwest of Hawaii. It's kind of managed by the US Fish and Wildlife, though. So on the left side of the picture, there's the person who led the project that we did. Yeah, so there's lots of seabirds here. It's a seabird habitat and the yellow crazy ants that were accidentally introduced were attacking a lot, especially the ground nesting birds, like the tropic birds. And they spray acid that kind of burns their skin. And seabird babies cannot or chicks cannot fly away, so it was very devastating to them. It's terrible. Can you go to the next slide, Mato? Yeah, so this is the Kauai Loa Wind Farm that I mentioned earlier where I worked with a couple of dogs. That's Bodie in the foreground searching for birds and bats. And this is a solo again, same dog that was at Johnston. This is on Mauna Kea, where they're doing seabird nest surveys. And yeah, these are endangered seabirds that are very kind of difficult to locate in a huge lava terrain area. So it helps to use a dog to kind of narrow down where they might be nesting. What kind of seabirds are they? What's their name? So there's Hawaiian Petrals and Vandrum Storm Petrals that are found in the high elevation sites. Newell's Fearwater is another endangered seabird, but they're located in other places. So again, yeah, this is Mauna Kea, too. It's kind of cool that you can, we're above the clouds. So it just tells you how high up we are. Yeah. This is Hanalei National Wildlife Refuge on the island of Kauai. And that's Deborah and her dog Xena doing avian botulism surveys. So this is a phenomenon where there's a kind of a toxin that the invertebrates like slugs and stuff accumulate in their bodies. And then when the ducks and water birds eat them, they also accumulate that botulism toxin to the point that they become paralyzed and can't even swim or eat. So the challenge with this is that once a duck dies, then it can spread to other ducks through what they call the fly, the carcass maggot cycle. So the body decomposes flies lay eggs on them and it turns into maggots. And then the maggots have the toxins and then other ducks eat the maggots. It's a little bit gross, but it's terrible and it can spread like wildfire. So if they find the, you know, carcasses quickly and remove them, then they can curb the botulism. So that's the idea behind these surveys. Is it really a big problem there? Lately, I think it has not been thanks to, you know, the efforts to look for the carcasses, not just by the dog teams, but visually by volunteers as well. Yeah. So yeah. And Kauai has the largest population of the native Hawaiian ducks. So it's really important to keep that. Do you want to go to some, is that the last picture? Do you want to go to some videos, Michael? Or will we have this one? This one's beautiful. Yeah, this is also an avian botulism survey in the same wildlife refuge. That's myself and solo again. Solo is no longer around, but he worked on a lot of projects before he passed. And this is Guinness who is a shepherd mix and he's doing some training actually working towards surveys eventually on a ship in Honolulu. Our goal is to search for invasive ants, yellow crazy ants, little fire ants, and then also rodents, mice and rats on these boats so that they don't transport them to like pristine environments and other remote islands. Yeah. That's Ula. He's a chocolate lab and his handler Julie, they're doing a, it's called an odor recognition test for little fire ants. So in detection dog training, as you work towards becoming operational, it's important to test the dog's abilities to find the trained target odor in a blind or, you know, situation where they don't know where it is just to confirm that the dog is able to find that target. So this is a down sea bird search at the Turtle Bay resort who is kind enough to let us do our detection trial there last September. So we wanted to test the efficacy of dog teams versus visual searchers for down sea birds. And so we hired a biologist to help us, you know, by hiding these seabird carcasses and then the teams will go look for them during a time search and we compared the results at the end. Yeah. And this is Marsha and her dog, Koa, doing a seabird survey in Princeville on Kauai. So yeah, they've been actively searching this whole seabird fallout season and they've actually found a few endangered birds and rescued them. So we're pretty happy about that. That's pretty cool. So how many other handlers do you have besides yourself currently? Let's see. We have about, I would say six or seven dog handlers. A lot of us handle multiple dogs. Like I have two dogs of my own, Zephyr and Guinness, and they each work on different projects. So yeah, we have more dogs than handlers, I would say. Yeah. And I've seen all, I mean, looks like from the pictures, most of them are bigger dogs that you have. A lot of them are for no reason other than they just happen to be. But we do have a terrier in our biosecurity program. We also have, yeah, we have another terrier also who is training towards rodent work as well. So they're both small dogs. And I'm looking at some of the other projects you have, invasive invertebrates. Can you talk a little bit about that? Yeah. So that includes the ants, which I've already mentioned, little fire ants, yellow crazy ants. And then Koki frogs is something that we kind of started out working on, but we have it on hold until later. Doing a project kind of involves a lot. There's collecting samples to train the dogs. There's finding locations to train them on real targets. There's collaborating with other agencies, finding, getting access to survey locations. So that's something that we weren't able to make happen with a Koki frogs at this stage. So we're going to do that later. But there's also, let's see, ants, frogs, and, oh, CRB. Yeah, coconut rhinoceros beetle. I'm sure you've heard of that. They eat the coconut trees. It's pretty bad. So we are training a team right now on Kaua'i to look for those so that they can hopefully get that under control on Kaua'i because it's still in the early stages over there compared to Oahu. Yeah, I mean, I guess I don't know what they would do to eradicate in Oahu. There's so many now. I've seen all those little things they put on trees with the beetle picture. Yeah. Oh, go ahead. I'm sorry. No, that's nothing. And then I was looking to that you have under projects, there's also under past projects, there's a rosy wolf snail. Yeah, that's an invasive snail that eats the native endangered snails. And so a lot of the endangered snails are housed in exposures like predator-proof fencing up in the mountains to protect them. But the invasive, you know, cannibal snail, they call it, sometimes do get into those exposures. So we did a test project to see if the dogs could help detect them. And the dogs were able to learn that odor and find them in controlled environments. But we found that it was quite challenging in the real environment that has a lot of thick vegetation, because that target doesn't have a strong odor. Yeah, so the dogs were able to find them, but it wasn't any faster really than people, you know, leafing through the leaf litter. So we decided that that was not the best use of dogs. But we wish that we could have made it work. Yeah, right. I mean, there are a lot of those. I think I was looking at the picture on your website. Your website's great, by the way. Thank you. And the pictures are beautiful. And I was looking at a picture of the rosy snail or whatever. Does that one come from Indonesia? I'm not sure where they originate, but yeah, I wouldn't be surprised if it's from Southeast Asia. Yeah, I mean, I know, I don't know if that's the one that carries the rat. I think a lot of the snails can carry including the African, giant African snails. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, I think your work is great. I'm so glad somebody has even thought of this. I mean, I had heard of dogs identifying COVID, which I think is good too. But this is a little bit more fun because you get to go to different places. Yeah, everything, you know. Yeah, we like it. Yeah. I mean, and I was looking here at, you know, volunteer opportunities on your website. And I thought I guess some of them are kind of interesting. Like, you know, you have something here that says a working dog foster home. Are there some dogs that don't have a place to stay? Yeah, right now we do. But for a while, we were looking for a foster home for the Belgian Malinois that does devil weed searches. She was between homes and we were looking for a place for her to stay. We just found a home for her though. And then this was another very interesting thing. Cut rodent foster home. So the rodents are part of our biosecurity program and also, you know, in training our dogs to do rodent detection in remote islands, we need to have our own pet rats so that they, we collect their scat to use for training. We sometimes use the rats themselves. We hide them in cages and ships and whatnot. So the dogs can go look for them and get trained on the live animal. So yeah, the rats are our pets, but we use them for training our dogs on the invasive rodents. Did you have a pet rat then? I do. The program rats, yeah. Oh, really? How many do you have? I'm kind of curious. So right now we just have two rats and one mouse in the program. Yeah, but we've had as many as, you know, four or five rats at the same time. So occasionally we want to shift them to a different foster home or maybe the primary foster will travel and we want somebody to care for them for a couple of weeks, that type of thing. Yeah, that's pretty, that's pretty funny. And then I see other stuff like this is, this is pretty cool, you know, potential videographer. I don't know who did all your photography, but the photography is fantastic on your website. Oh, thank you. It's mostly my husband. He's a photographer. I wrote him into helping. Well, I mean, how, besides going to your website, I guess you can donate there and then there's volunteer opportunities. Is there anything else that people can do that you want people to know about? Sure, just like spreading awareness about the use of conservation dogs, which hopefully in turn spreads awareness about conservation efforts. You know, what can everybody do to mitigate invasive species like little fire ants, things like that? Just spreading awareness would be great. Well, thank you so much. We're out of time, so we have to wrap it up. Thank you so much for having me. Yes, yes, no, I really enjoyed talking to you. It's fascinating. It's really very fascinating. Okay, we're out of time and we have to wrap it up. I'm Dr. Grace O'Neill. This is Healthy Planet on the ThinkTech live streaming network series. We've been talking with Keoko Johnson, founder of Conservation Dogs of Hawaii. Thanks to Michael, our broadcast engineer and the rest of the crew at ThinkTech for hosting our show. And thanks to you, our listeners for listening. I'll see you in two weeks for more of Healthy Planet on ThinkTech, the show for people who care about their health and the health of our planet. My guests in two weeks will be Maui Pig Sanctuary. If you have ideas for the show or questions for my future show guests, please contact me at Healthy Planet at Gmail. Help you plan at ThinkTech at gmail.com. Check out my website at graceinhoi.com or Instagram at Graceful Living 365 for more information on my projects, including future show guests. I'm Dr. Grace O'Neill. Aloha, everyone.