Using Fido to find invasive species & rare animals
Fiona Ng
is LAist's deputy managing editor and leads a team of reporters who explore food, culture, history, events and more.
Published August 17, 2024 9:00 PM
Banshee, a Patterdale terrier, is on the k9inSCENTive team. She does botany work helping to detect the presence of pathogenic fungi in nursery plants and soil.
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Marcella Winslow
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Courtesy K9inSCENTive
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Topline:
Ecological conservation has a new best friend — dogs that are trained to use their superior sense of smell to find invasive plants, locate endangered animals, and find dead birds and bats at renewable energy sites.
A brief history: Ecological scent detection started to take root in the U.S. in the 1990s, after technological advances enabled DNA materials to be extracted from animal scat. From there, some biologists and ecologists started to explore the idea of using scent detection dogs to track endangered animals using their poop.
And now: The field has grown and developed, and these working dogs are used in everything from finding endangered snakes in the San Francisco Bay, to detecting environmental contaminants on a Indigenous reservation in Montana.
Lauralea Oliver has worked with dogs for most of her life. She grew up with a German Shepherd as a pet, was a dog trainer for many years, worked in animals shelters — all of which led her to dabble in scent work about 15 years ago.
"I met a lot of people — professional handlers that did narcotics, search and rescue," said Oliver, who lives in the community of Acton near Antelope Valley. "I started to feel a pull in that direction."
Oliver is also a big naturalist. So she started researching fields that combine these different interests.
What she happened upon was the then nascent field of using dogs for ecological scent detection. "A marriage made in heaven for me," Oliver said.
At that time, her sidekick was a working dog rescued from a county shelter named George. Today, Oliver owns and run k9inSCENTive in Acton with a small team of trainers and five dogs.
A nose for everything
Their projects have taken them to various parts of California and beyond, working with different plant and animal species, be it detecting a fungal pathogen in Northern California that causes Sudden Oak Death in trees (with Bolt, the cattle dog), to finding and safeguarding the drop-dead gorgeous and heavily poached San Francisco garter snakes in its namesake city (with Muon, the Belgian malinois), to conducting population surveys for the possibly extinct Morro Bay kangaroo rat (with Vector, the now-retired Belgian malinois).
"You'll find that if you talk to conservation dog people, most of the dogs are trained on something that's either state or federally protected, because that's what they need the dogs for," Oliver said.
Lauralea Oliver with Mayhem, a Belgian malinois, an ecological scent detection dogs.
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Marcella Winslow.
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Courtesy k9inSCENTive
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A majority of her projects, she said, involve finding dead bat and birds at wind or solar farms for impact surveys that are required by the federal government. That work typically falls on Mamba the Labrador retriever mix, another labrador Circe, and Muon.
"They find 80 to 90% of the things that fall from the sky. Previously we'd use a human surveyor to do visual checks and they're not nearly as good, especially with finding small targets like small birds and bats," she said.
A needle in a haystack
Lately, Oliver and her team have been conducting a population count in different areas of Arizona for a species of rare cactus called pediocactus — one of the most trafficked plants in the world.
Not only does the team have to sweep through a large area, these cacti are also tiny.
"Some of them are as small as like a nickel," Oliver said. "The biggest one we found was probably like a quarter."
For several hours in the morning, Circe would tagged team with Muon to search for the plant — with the labrador identifying general areas where the plant is present, and the malinois zeroing in on the cactus.
The method of using dogs in conservation efforts was documented as far back as the 1890s in New Zealand. The practice started to gain ground in the 1990s, when science figured out how to extract DNA materials from fecal matter, said Kayla Fratt with K9 Conservationists in Oregon.
"All of a sudden finding poop was really valuable, and that's where the dogs really took off," Fratt said, because the technology made more ecological research to be done through fecal-only surveys possible.
Kayla Fratt and Barley, her conservation dog with K9 Conservationists.
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Courtesy K9 Conservationists
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Barley, the ecological scent detection dog.
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Courtesy K9 Conservationists
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And since, Fratt said, "finding poop, which is, for lack of a better phrase, our better bread and butter."
In 2022, K9 Conservationists' very first project was to help train cheetah scat detection dogs in Kenya. Since then, Fratt and her team of trainers and border collie mixes have worked in places ranging from Alaska to look for wolf scat, to Santa Barbara to track the poop of pumas, black bears and other animals.
"From the conservation perspective, if you don't know what an animal is eating, you don't know what part of the ecosystem is most important to protect in order to keep them healthy," Fratt said, who is pursuing a doctorate degree at Oregon State University with a research focus on conservation dogs and hosts a podcast on the topic.
And all it took a handful of expertly trained dogs and their handlers — something unimaginable just three decades ago.
"The way that we all used to survey and get data from a lot of wildlife species was pretty invasive — it's trapping and collaring and following those individual animals," said Alice Whitelaw, a co-founder of the Montana-based nonprofit, Working Dogs for Conservation (WD4C).
As such, as advances in fecal DNA took hold, Whitelaw (then a wolf biologist) and a few like-minded scientists founded WD4C in the mid-1990s to explore using dogs in conservation — one among a few organizations to emerge at the time.
Alice Whitelaw and her detection dog, Rue, in the Carrizo Plain National Monument in central California.
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Courtesy Working Dogs for Conservation
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Scat from Alice Whitelaw's recent project to locate the scat of endangered Blunt-nosed leopard lizard, and California Whiptail lizard, as well as Blainville horned lizard.
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Courtesy Working Dogs for Conservation
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"We were all dog people that just happened to be biologists and ecologists," Whitelaw said. "We reached out to a lot of narcotics officers, and they all thought we were kind of nuts, because we wanted to find poop."
From that starting point of using scat for ecological monitoring of endangered and rare animals, WD4C expanded to other areas: anti-poaching detection; finding invasive plants and species known in the conservation field as biosecurity; and environmental justice, like working with the Blackfoot tribe and the nonprofit Indigenous Vision to identify contaminants in the environment.
"The dogs aren't finding forever chemicals and toxins in the water supply or diseases in the landscape, what they're looking for is mink or otter scat that contains those contaminants," Whitelaw said. "That gives us an idea of what the indigenous population might be facing in terms of their water quality and also their ability to use land and water resources the way they have forever."
'Girls with dogs'
An OG in the field, Whitelaw has the rare vantage point of seeing how dog conservation detection has evolved over the last 30 years.
"Often we would show up to do a project and it was like, 'Oh God, it's the girls and their dogs,'" said Whitelaw. "It just wasn't taken very seriously in the beginning, and now it's taken very seriously worldwide."
As the discipline develops and expands, the conversation has turned to the potential of coming up with a set of standards to maintain the integrity and longevity of the field. But it's not easy.
"Any law enforcement certification, you know, there's very specific things that you test for. Can the dog smell cocaine? Can the dog properly track a human at this distance in these given parameters?" said Whitelaw. "Those things can be more easily tested for than can a dog find Kit fox scat, blunt nosed leopard lizard, invasive plants of four different species, the list is endless."
That's because the abilities of these working dogs are endless.
"Their capacity to not only learn multiple scents, and great numbers of multiple scents, but to remember them for years and years and years. It just still kind of blows me away," Whitelaw said.
Makenna Cramer
covers the daily drumbeat of Southern California — events, processes and nuances making it a unique place to call home.
Published April 29, 2026 5:01 PM
Workers repair potholes and skim a large portion of street in Los Angeles on Jan. 13.
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Genaro Molina
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Getty Images
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Topline:
MyLA311, the system designed to help residents access city services for graffiti removal or streetlight outages, had a makeover last year, but since then, some Angelenos and Los Angeles city staff have reported it has been plagued by problems. City officials say they're working to make fixes.
Why now: Councilmembers Imelda Padilla and Monica Rodriguez led a motion aimed at addressing the issues concerning the system’s overall functionality and accountability. The City Council approved that motion Wednesday.
Why it matters: “Reports and individuals are telling us that because of this broken 311 app, folks are once again going back to using Excel sheets, phone calls, paper and pen in order to engage in service delivery, and I think that that's a problem,” Padilla said during the council meeting.
The backstory: MyLA311 is set up so residents can report non-emergency issues and track requests for tree inspections, homeless encampment services and illegal dumping, to name a few. There are 86 options in neighborhoods, according to Mayor Karen Bass’ office, which helped launch the new system.
What's next: The motion instructs Public Works to make a formal report of any problems with the system, including how they may be affecting service timelines and completion rates, and asks the city’s IT agency to come up with potential solutions.
MyLA311, the system designed to help residents access city services for graffiti removal or streetlight outages, got a makeover last year, but since then some Angelenos and Los Angeles city staff have reported it has been plagued by problems.
The city has received “numerous complaints” about the updated website and app, including issues with GPS and logging work, according to officials.
MyLA311 is set up so residents can report non-emergency issues and track requests for tree inspections, homeless encampment services and illegal dumping, to name a few. There are 86 options in neighborhoods, according to Mayor Karen Bass’ office, which helped launch the new system.
Staffers within the city’s Department of Public Works have said they’ve been frustrated by the rollout, according to city officials. They say it now takes longer to add their responses to service requests, and the city can’t record completed work that doesn’t have a service request connected to it.
City Council members Imelda Padilla and Monica Rodriguez led a motion aimed at addressing the issues, saying they’ve caused concerns about the system’s overall functionality and accountability.
“Reports and individuals are telling us that because of this broken 311 app, folks are once again going back to using Excel sheets, phone calls, paper and pen in order to engage in service delivery, and I think that that's a problem,” Padilla said during Wednesday’s council meeting.
The motion instructs Public Works to make a formal report of any problems with the system, including how they may be affecting service timelines and completion rates, and asks the city’s IT agency to come up with potential solutions.
It was approved in a 12-0 vote Wednesday. Councilmembers Bob Blumenfield, Eunisses Hernandez and Adrin Nazarian were absent.
How we got here
Bass announced the launch of the new MyLA311 last year, saying the previous website and app were outdated and had lasted years past their lifecycle.
In a 2023 directive, she’d called for the system to be modernized with the goal of providing better customer service and communication about the status of residents’ requests.
“This new and improved way to request and receive city services is another example of how we are breaking away from the old way of doing things to make our neighborhoods cleaner and safer,” Bass said in a March 2025 statement.
But some people say the new system is falling short.
The Sylmar Neighborhood Council agreed the system needs improvements, writing in a community impact statement that MyLA311 fails to serve L.A. taxpayers effectively if it’s difficult to use or inaccurate.
In public comments, some residents cited “major issues” with the system, including GPS and location accuracy, invalid addresses and missing or incomplete service categories. One commenter wrote that addresses were being routed to other areas, some of them outside the city.
“As a result, they frequently lead to confusion in the field, delays in response and, in some cases, requests going unaddressed due to the difficulty in locating the reported issue or misdirection caused by inaccurate data,” the commenter said.
What’s ahead
The City Council approved several instructions aimed at improving MyLA311, including the following:
Public Works is expected to report back on its issues with the system.
The city’s Information Technology Agency is expected to report on system performance, including operational issues, and provide solutions as needed.
Public Works and IT are expected to provide quarterly reports on service request data, including backlogs, average response times and requests received and closed.
The Supreme Court's conservative majority seemed ready Wednesday to allow the Trump administration to potentially proceed with mass deportations of more than a million foreign nationals, including those from Haiti and Syria, who live and work legally in the United States.
How we got here: Until now these individuals have been accorded temporary legal status because their safety is imperiled by war or natural disasters in their home countries. Congress enacted the Temporary Protected Status program in 1990, and every president since then — Republican and Democrat — has embraced TPS. President Trump, however, is trying to end it. On Wednesday his solicitor general, D. John Sauer, told the justices that the statute clearly bars any court review of the administration's decisions. And he dismissed the idea that a separate law established to provide procedural fairness does not allow the courts to review the Homeland Security agency's decision-making either.
Read on . . . for more on today's court proceedings.
The Supreme Court's conservative majority seemed ready Wednesday to allow the Trump administration to potentially proceed with mass deportations of more than a million foreign nationals, including those from Haiti and Syria, who live and work legally in the United States.
Congress enacted the Temporary Protected Status program in 1990, and every president since then — Republican and Democrat — has embraced TPS. President Donald Trump, however, is trying to end it.
On Wednesday his solicitor general, D. John Sauer, told the justices that the statute clearly bars any court review of the administration's decisions. And he dismissed the idea that a separate law established to provide procedural fairness does not allow the courts to review the Homeland Security agency's decision-making either. Pressed by the court's three liberal justices, Sauer insisted that the courts cannot review anything.
"None of those procedural steps required by the statue are reviewable. That's your position?" asked Justice Sonia Sotomayor.
"Correct," responded Sauer.
"What you're basically saying is that Congress wrote a statute for no purpose," Sotomayor said.
Justice Elena Kagan noted that under the statute the secretary of Homeland Security is supposed to consult with the U.S. State Department about what the conditions are in those countries that people have been forced to flee. What if she didn't do that at all, Kagan asked. Or what if she asked, but the response from the State Department came back: "Wasn't that baseball game last night great!"
Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson asked what would happen if the secretary used a Ouija board to make decisions?
To all these hypotheticals, Solicitor General Sauer stood firm. That prompted this from Sotomayor: "Now, we have a president saying at one point that Haiti is a 'filthy, dirty, and disgusting s--thole country.' I'm quoting him. He declared illegal immigrants, which he associated with TPS, as poisoning the blood of America. I don't see how that one statement is not a prime example … showing that a discriminatory purpose may have played a part in this decision."
Sauer pushed back, noting that Kristi Noem, the then-DHS secretary, had not mentioned race at all. That prompted this response from Justice Jackson, the only Black woman on the court, "So the position of the United States is that we have an actual racial epithet that we aren't allowed to look at all the context."
Justice Amy Coney Barrett, the mother of two adopted Haitian children, interjected at that point to clarify the administration's position. Are you conceding that individuals with TPS status could bring a challenge based on race discrimination? she asked.
Sauer appeared to concede the point.
Representing the Haitians, lawyer Geoffrey Pipoly described the administration's review as "a sham."
"The true reason for the termination [of TPS status] is the president's racial animus toward non-white immigrants and bare dislike of Haitians in particular," Pipoly said. "The secretary herself described people from Haiti" and from other non-white countries as "killers, leeches, saying, 'We don't want them, not one,'" while "simultaneously enacting another humanitarian form of relief for white and only white South Africans."
That was too much for Justice Samuel Alito who asked Pipoly, "Do you think that if you put Syrians, Turks, Greeks and other people who live around the Mediterranean in a line-up, do you think you could say those people are … non-white?"
An uncomfortable Pipoly resisted categorizing each group until Alito got to his own roots.
"How about southern Italians?" Alito inquired, prompting laughter in the courtroom.
Responded Pipoly: "Certainly 120 years ago when we had our last wave of European immigration, southern Italians were not considered white. … Our concept of these things evolves over time."
At the end of Wednesday's court session, one thing was clear: President Trump may be furious at some of the conservative justices he appointed for invalidating his tariffs, but for the most part, he is getting his way. Especially in light of the court's 6-to-3 decision, announced Wednesday, which effectively guts what remains of the landmark Voting Rights Act, once celebrated as a signature achievement of American Democracy.
Copyright 2026 NPR
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Fiona Ng
is LAist's deputy managing editor and leads a team of reporters who explore food, culture, history, events and more.
Published April 29, 2026 4:14 PM
Artemis the German Shepherd is the last dog from Eaton Fire at Pasadena Humane to get adopted.
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Courtesy Pasadena Humane
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Topline:
The last dog from the Eaton Fire taken in by Pasadena Humane has now been adopted.
Why it matters: The Eaton Fire destroyed nearly 9,500 structures, including about 6,000 homes. Two days after the first broke out, Pasadena Humane reported receiving more than 350 pets from displaced residents.
The backstory: Artemis the German shepherd was originally taken to the Pasadena animal shelter for emergency boarding. His family, which lost its home in the January fire, ultimately decided to put him up for adoption.
The last dog from the Eaton Fire taken in by Pasadena Humane has now been adopted.
Artemis the German shepherd was originally taken to the Pasadena animal shelter for emergency boarding. His family, which lost its home in the January fire, ultimately decided to put him up for adoption.
"The silver lining to all of that is — with all this tragedy — this incredible story of hope where we were able to help foster these animals we’re returning home," said Sarie Hooker, communications manager at Pasadena Humane.
During his stay at Pasadena Humane, the cream-color pup won over many hearts.
"He's just such a striking boy. He's got this really fun, loving personality. He's very regal," Hooker said.
Hooker said Artemis was adopted by a family through the shelter's foster-to-adopt program.
"He just did amazingly. And the next thing we knew, he was adopted," Hooker said. "So it's a happy story."
Artemis says hello to a new family.
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Courtesy Pasadena Humane
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The Eaton Fire destroyed nearly 9,500 structures, including about 6,000 homes. Two days after the fire broke out, Pasadena Humane reported receiving more than 350 pets from displaced residents.
By the second week of the fire, the shelter had taken in some 600 pets, Hooker said.
" In totality, we were able to help with thousands of animals specifically for emergency boarding," Hooker said, including every kind of pet you can think of, as well as wild animals.
" We were seeing skunks, squirrels, hawks, owls, peacocks, raccoons, possums," she said.
Artemis isn't just the last dog to find a home — or return home — from the Eaton Fire.
He is the last animal.
" Artemis was our final, final animal — like dog, cat, critter. Anything else under the sun. He was the last boy. So we're very happy," she said.
Mariana Dale
reports on K-12 education, including how students exercise their civic power.
Published April 29, 2026 2:31 PM
People gathered in downtown L.A. for May Day in 2025.
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Frank Stoltze
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LAist
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Topline:
Southern California and national organizers are calling on communities to abstain from work, school and shopping Friday in recognition of May Day.
The backstory: May Day started after an 1886 strike tied to the fight for an eight-hour work day. The protest turned violent after police attacked workers. In the 1990s, L.A. organizers started to connect the labor movement with advocacy for immigrant rights.
What's new: This year’s “economic blackout” is modeled after January protests in Minnesota following the surge of immigration enforcement and shooting deaths of two U.S. citizens. “ Our vision includes an economy that works for everyone with a living wage, strong labor protections and programs that keep families housed, fed, educated and healthy,” said Francisco Moreno, executive director of the Council of Mexican Federations in North America, in a Tuesday press conference.
Find a rally: What’s typically the region’s largest May Day gathering starts Friday morning at MacArthur Park, and events are planned throughout the region.
The “economic blackout” is modeled after January protests in Minnesota following the surge of immigration enforcement and shooting deaths of two U.S. citizens.
“Our vision includes an economy that works for everyone with a living wage, strong labor protections and programs that keep families housed, fed, educated and healthy,” said Francisco Moreno, executive director of the Council of Mexican Federations in North America, in a Tuesday press conference.
The organization is one of more than 100 involved in planning a Los Angeles May Day rally with the theme, “solo el pueblo shuts it down: no school, no work, no shopping.”
“Starting there really sends a message that we're here,” said Kristal Romero, press secretary for the Los Angeles County Federation of Labor. “We're standing with this community, and if you take on one of us, you take on all of us.”
May Day’s history in LA
May Day, sometimes called International Workers' Day, started after an 1886 strike tied to the fight for an eight-hour work day. The protest turned violent after police attacked workers. In the 1990s, L.A. organizers started to connect the labor movement with advocacy for immigrant rights.
Romero said the Federation has offered training on de-escalation, conflict resolution and non-violent protests and that hundreds of people will act as “peacekeepers” during Friday’s rally and march.
“ A lot of times, folks can get caught in echo chambers and it may really feel hopeless,” Romero said. “The big point of these events is to inspire hope to show people we're all here, we're all fighting for the same thing.”
