This is Bear. He's a good dog. Bear was abandoned as a puppy due to OCD, which in dogs is usually a sign that they need a job to do. And so Bear was trained as an animal tracker -for a good purpose. And now he's going out in areas of Australia ravaged by fire to seek out wildlife in need of help.
Bear, a Cattle Dog cross-breed, is trained to find both koalas and quolls, another small Australian marsupial, in the wild.
“This is the first year that we have been involved in the fires,” Romane Cristescu, his minder and ecologist at The University of the Sunshine Coast, told Reuters.
“It is a bit more dangerous than what we usually do.”
Bear, who usually looks for sick or injured wildlife for conservation and research purposes in calmer conditions, has been wearing protective socks on his paws to search through areas scorched by fire.
Bushfires have been raging in Queensland and New South Wales, destroying both wildlife and the habitats that sustain them. The fires have also killed four people and burned hundreds of homes.
This is Bear. He was abandoned as a puppy due to his OCD, but quickly found a new life as a koala detection dog. As wildfires devastate Australia’s east coast, Bear is doing his best to locate any injured or misplaced koalas. He’s their unexpected savior, and our thirteenth 15/10 pic.twitter.com/dWe8tWbEJo
— WeRateDogs® (@dog_rates) November 21, 2019
Read more about Bear and the bushfires at SBS News. Good luck, Bear! -via Metafilter