Dog takes leap of faith for frogs
Border collie being trained to protect threatened species, writes Jan Bornman
SHE is only six months old, but Jessie, a thoroughbred border collie, is already being billed as the potential saviour of the African bullfrog.
The offspring of two hardworking herding dogs, Jessie is being trained to sniff out the giant frogs, which are a protected species.
Experts believe they are gradually being wiped out by largescale construction in Gauteng — and training Jessie could also pay off for developers.
But because a dog her age has a tendency to attack anything that moves, Jessie first needed some basic training.
We’ve got to make the right decision for conservation
She kicked off her year-long training stint with no more than a cup of tea last week — or, rather, several over a few days.
Her sense of smell is boosted with tea, which is presented more diluted each time as a way of managing her response to her first surprise encounter with the frog.
Using live frogs from the start might startle her and she might attack, said her Swedish trainer, Peter Bergman. “You must constantly challenge the dog, otherwise it will get bored and not cooperate,” he said.
The idea to train Jessie came from her owner, Esté Matthew, a master’s student in zoology at North-West University, after she attended a lecture by Bergman last year.
Bergman, a geologist, has been using his five-year-old Alsatian, Rex, to do mineral exploration all over the world. He is helping Matthew and her supervisor, Professor Ché Weldon, to train Jessie and is also teaching them to train other dogs.
However, Bergman’s first thought about the idea was: “A frog is a frog. Who gives a f**k about a frog?” But he eventually agreed.
But for Weldon, who works in the African Amphibian Conservation Research Group at the university, finding endangered frog species is not just about conservation.
He said developers were spending huge amounts of money on environmentalimpact assessments, and sometimes projects folded as a result of the belated discovery of the creatures. Dogs were a much cheaper option in this regard.
“We’ve got to make the right decisions for both human development and the conservation of nature.”
He said training dogs to help trace the frogs could also lead to breakthroughs in research into the Amatola toad, a species so rare that it was thought to be extinct between 1998 and 2011, when it was spotted for the first time in 13 years.