Baxter has nose to save planet

A TOWNSVILLE border collie that was a search and rescue dog in a former life is now turning his talents to saving the planet.

Six- year- old Baxter is earning his daily dog biscuit by sniffing out invasive weeds. The canine eco- warrior is living proof you really can teach an old dog new tricks.

His owner Jacqui Diggins from Bluewater originally trained Baxter as a search and rescue dog, but now the canine “brainiac” is turning his talents not to saving lives, but to saving planet Earth.

In industry parlance, Baxter is now a conservation protection dog.

He sniffs out invasive weed pests. He is the first dog in Australia to sniff out an invasive weed threatening the environment and cattle industry.

His most recent assignment was to track down fireweed on the Atherton Tableland.

Baxter spent seven days in training with Ms Diggins before showing off his new skills as a fireweed sniffer dog up on the Tableland.

“He took off, smelled the weed and dropped to the ground in a spot where we could see nothing,’’ Mrs Diggins said.

“We found a tiny fireweed the size of my thumb, and that was the first of three. We would have walked straight over the plants. Baxter can smell the weed from 20m.”

Ms Diggins said her border collie was born blind in one eye.

“It has never stopped him, or slowed him down,’’ she said.

A Churchill Scholarship recipient for research into using detection dogs to support conservation programs, she has visited New Zealand and America to see the wide range of uses for such detection dogs.

“In Australia dogs are now being used for everything from feral cat detection to quoll surveys, koala and frog detections,” she said.

“A dog’s sense of smell is believed to be between 1000 and 10,000 times better than ours. Humans can smell baking bread about a block away, but dogs can smell every ingredient.”

Ms Diggins said when she was in America on her Churchill Fellowship a detection dog identified a pine marten in a tree.

She said the scientists she was working with had been looking for a pine marten for five years without success.

She said conservation protection dogs were being used in the US to detect killer whale scat in the ocean.

She said the dogs could