Not barking... the detective dog who sniffs out lost cats

COCKER spaniel Molly is a sniffer dog with a difference – she specialises in finding missing cats.

The former rescue dog has helped reunite 100 cats with owners since she started work with a pet detective,

When she finds a missing cat she resists the urge to chase it up a tree – and just lies down wagging her tail.

Colin Butcher has been tracking lost and stolen pets for 10 years after expanding his detective agency. But finding cats was always difficult – until he recruited his own tracker dog.

He said: “Cats go to ground when injured or sick. They can also get locked in sheds or outbuildings.

“They get very stressed in strange places and this trauma is exacerbated as they cannot survive without food or water for very long.

“I needed to speed up search for lost cats and did just that through Molly.”

First she was taught to lock on to cats’ scent and then individual cats, using a sense of smell a million times stronger than a human’s.

Colin, 55, from Billingshurst, Sussex, said: “Molly gives us t h e the ability to cover an area much more quickly because she can use her nose, whereas we can only use our eyes.

“Her temperament is what makes her such a good pet detective dog.

“She doesn’t know a cat from a cow to be honest – she’s just using her scent but she’s brilliant.

“To her it’s just a game and she’ll lie down once she’s found what she was looking for. She never chases the cats – we have two cats at home who she gets on fine with.”

She was rejected by two families because her working instinct made her difficult to look after. But then she was taken on and trained by the charity Medical Detection Dogs. Chief executive Dr Claire Guest, said: “When Colin approached us, I was sure we could help.

“Molly was an unsuitable family pet but we could see she was very intelligent. After several months of scent discrimination training she can now use her nose to detect a specific individual cat.”