Rogue, like all of us, works for food. (He prefers his steak medium rare.) Unlike us, however, he is a five-year-old Belgian Sheepdog whose owner, Dave Vesely, is the executive director of the Oregon Wildlife Institute. Rogue's latest accomplishment: spotting an endangered plant and the precious, pin-sized eggs laid there by an endangered butterfly.
Dogs are really good at finding all sorts of things by scent. Hunting with their noses, dogs have been trained since ancient times in the search and rescue of humans. More recently, their horizons and usefulness have been expanded to include searching for explosives, contraband, and the scat of endangered species of animals.
Greg Fitzpatrick, Corvallis Land Steward for the Nature Conservancy in Oregon, says the idea of using dogs to pick out plants first came to him when he read in ...
