A 3-year-old black Labrador retriever is reportedly the first dog trained to sniff out dead or injured dolphins. Chris Blankenship a marine biologist with 20+ years of experience studying marine mammals, works with Cloud at Dolphin Cove, a research facility and tourist destination in Key Largo.
From the Palm Beach Post:
"She's become one of my best friends," Blankenship said. "She's the perfect dog. She has a phenomenal nose. She has a nose that, now, canine officers say they wish they'd kept her. But she's mine now."
Cloud already has found a dead pilot whale, a stranded dolphin and a necropsied animal that was being towed behind a boat on a rope when the rope broke and the animal sank, Blankenship said.
"That was a submerged animal underwater that she found," he said.
Blankenship dreamed up the idea for a dolphin-sniffing dog in 2005, after roughly 80 dolphins became stranded off Marathon Key. About 30 of them died.
"The stranded animals died of dehydration, things like that," Blankenship said. "I thought, 'If we had some way of locating the animals ...' "
Read the full article here.
