Just when you thought you've seen it all.....
Elvis the Dog Sniffs Out Pregnant Polar Bears
For polar bear pregnancy tests, it’s all about the poop. Elvis the beagle is helping zoos around the country figure out if their polar bears are pregnant, and he gets it right 97 percent of the time. But Elvis has never met a polar bear. Instead, he sniffs samples sent to him from zoos around the country, anxious to know whether they can expect a little cub or not.
Dogs are trained to sniff out all kinds of things, from illegal wildlife to cancer to pesky insects.
A chocolate Labrador retriever named Papa Bear and a golden retriever named Bretagne are even trained to let diabetics know when their sugar levels are too high or too low, according to ABC News.
But when Kansas-based dog trainer Matt Skogen received an email from a conservation expert at the Cincinnati Zoo asking him to help figure out if the zoo’s polar bears were pregnant, he was caught off guard.
“A zoo in the Midwest, polar bears, pregnancies—when I first received that email, I really was a little skeptical as to the validity of it,” he says. “I get some doozies, and this is right near the top.”
Dog owners have long suspected that their dogs can tell if the owner is pregnant, but there’s never been a study to prove the suspicion, Skogen says. The pet pooches are likely just reacting to a general biological change in their owner, unless they were specifically trained to detect pregnancy. That’s unlikely, since this is the first time Skogen knows of a dog being professionally trained for the task.
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http://voices.nationalgeographic.com/2013/11/12/elvis-the-dog-sniffs-out-pregnant-polar-bears/
