Jake loves to work. The black Labrador loves to work so much that he doesn’t even care for the reward he receives when he does his job successfully.
“That’s pretty unusual,” said Dr. Todd Steury, assistant professor of Wildlife Ecology in the School of Forestry and Wildlife Sciences. “He has such an amazing drive that he doesn’t need the ball as a reward to entice him to work. He’s a really stellar dog.”
Jake, along with another black Lab named Ivy, were specially trained to track Burmese pythons in the Florida Everglades. A team of researchers in the school of Forestry and Wildlife Sciences recently began an effort to better understand the outbreak of pythons and the effect they are having on the ecosystem.
The first Burmese python was spotted in Florida in 1979 and the number is now estimated in the tens of thousands. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service on Jan. 17 made it illegal to import Burmese pythons or transport them across state lines.
Researchers agree that the outbreak was mostly due to python owners releasing the snakes into the wild once they became too large to care for. Burmese pythons can reach up to 20 feet in length.
From The Auburn Villager: https://www.auburnvillager.com/story_1332958063027704_20120329-AU-researchers-use-detection-dogs–to-find-pythons.html