we are on our way to a park in cornelia, georgia. we arrive and stumble out. it’s cool. much cooler than athens where i live. i hook the leashes on the dogs and get them ready to go.

there are three of them. laney, a young, brown, curly haired dog with no manners and a nose for exploring places—and people. lily, slightly older and brimming with confidence. she has curly, light brown, almost gray hair. she loves to pull and sniff and wants the attention of anyone walking by. penny, the old lady of the pack, is small, stocky, and shy. she loves her sisters and will follow them anywhere, but she won’t make the first move. penny has short, tan hair with a tuxedo white chest, a white stripe down her snout, and stinky breath. i hand the dogs leashes to my boyfriend one by one, and we are ready to go.  

we always start our walks in the same place: by the dog park. all three of the dogs pull towards the poop bag dispenser and of course, the trash can. as every dog owner knows, they cannot help but pull you towards the dirtiest thing around.

as we walk by, i see multiple piles of forgotten feces just steps away from the trash and bag dispenser. i scoff and we continue our walk, dogs pulling us in every direction. we come across a small stream about one third into the walk where i see two more piles of “forgotten” feces – then laney squats to poop. i begin to empathize a little more with the owners that had left their dogs’ “marks” behind, but i then begin to think about the impact of the forgotten feces.

my background is in ecology, so my mind immediately begins to imagine the impacts on not only this stream, but the environment around it too. i pick up laney’s poop and take one for the team, continuing to pick up the other two piles and discarding them all in the appropriate disposal bins. as we got on with our walk, i was reminded of a program that was discussed in a lecture during my freshwater ecosystems course. it is called enviro pet waste network (epwn), and it’s an entire program dedicated to reducing the impacts of pet waste on the environment.

according to epwn, dog poop contains not only excess nutrients, but pathogens as well. when mixed with storm water, this can lead to the transmission of pathogens or nutrient deposition into our lakes, rivers, and streams. this deposition of excess nutrients, specifically nitrogen and phosphorus, can contribute to algae blooms in water bodies, which then leads to declines in biodiversity and the viability of the water and areas surrounding the water.

it’s another form of littering. if one person leaves their pet’s poop, it most likely will not cause a disturbance in the ecosystem, but when it happens over and over again, the ecosystem faces the consequences.

so from laney, lily, penny, and i: please pick up your pup’s poop!

for more information, please visit: https://epwn.org/information/environmental-impacts-of-dog-waste/

well … it’s funny how things come full circle.

my first year at middlebury college i took a class called adventure writing and digital storytelling. the course was simple — spend a month with an interesting local and tell their story. i wrote a few pages, shot a short (poorly executed) video and spent a lot of time with a wide-eyed, longhaired vermont farmer who loved dog mushing. i was hooked. the class ended, but i continued to tell stories.

fast-forward four years. i embark on the seminal post-college road trip with my roommate, benji. we were planet forward explorers — off to discover innovations in america’s food system in a mom van. in the dead of winter and without a single lead, we tracked down, stumbled upon and connected with people — following their stories as they led us across the country. we met tony in his teaching garden in new orleans, rachel as she tandem biked compost through austin, and the cooksley’s calves in the sand hills of nebraska. the road trip opened my eyes to entire new landscapes and ways of life and inspired me to continue on my quest to be a lifelong storyteller.

multiple food service jobs later, and a whole lot of moonlighting, and i’m finally, finally, working in film full time and producing my first long form documentary. the story? it’s about a dog mushing dairy farmer setting off on a cross-continent road trip.

sound familiar?

this project is a culmination of a lot of things for me, but even more for farmer doug butler. since milking his first cow on the evening of 1966, doug hasn’t left the farm for more than a couple of days. in all that time he’s had the same dream — racing his sled dogs in the world championships in alaska. today, at the age of 65, he’s on the doorstep of that adventure, and i am honored to be tagging along to tell his story. 

i invite you to follow along on www.underdogfilm.org and humbly ask for your financial support in our kickstarter effort to fund the trip to alaska.

as doug says, “you only live this life once, so let’s do something … let’s get ‘er done.”

however, some jobs done by dogs are a bit more unusual. since 1982 the maryland department of agriculture has had at least one dog as a member of their apiary inspectors team. this practice is not just uncommon though. it does not appear that any other place in the country uses dogs for this purpose, although there is one dog, specially outfitted in his own beekeeping suit, doing the same work in australia.

the canine detectives are trained to sniff out american foulbrood, or afb, in a hive. if afb is detected the dog will sit by the infected hive to notify their handler.

american foulbrood is a very serious bacterial disease, one which infected hives rarely recover from. the disease has two stages, the spore and the vegetative stage. a hive is infected when a worker bee picks up afb spores from an affected colony or contaminated equipment. the spores are transferred to the developing larvae through food, and during the bacterium’s vegetative stage, and the bacteria spores rapidly multiply, creating billions of new spores. when the brood cell is capped and the larvae are sealed the young larvae, usually glistening white, turn a coffee brown then black, and sink to the floor of the cell in a goopy mass. eventually this will dry into a hard scale on the cell’s bottom, which will contain many spores and infect future larvae in the cell.

american foulbrood will eventually kill almost every hive it infects. furthermore, it continues to wreak havoc on the area’s bee population even after the originally infected hive is decimated. bees frequently steal honey and nectar from weak or dead hives, and afb spores can be transmitted to a new hive through this process.

spores can also exist for up to 30 years on beekeeping equipment. if equipment is left unsterilized it will infect other hives that it is used on. the most reliable way to clean equipment and hives is to burn them. unfortunately, even this is not guaranteed to purge the equipment of the bacteria.

given the high possibility for contamination with afb it seems only logical to inspect hives in the most efficient way possible. maryland’s chief apiary inspector, and owner and handler of the current apiary inspection hound, cybil preston can check around 10 hives in 45 minutes. mack, her dog, can check 100 in the same amount of time. over mack’s predecessor, klinker’s entire career 100% of hives he identified as afb positive were confirmed when later tested by the usda. and while mack’s statistics are not currently out, in field testing he correctly identified 100% of infected hives.  

clearly, introducing apiary inspection dogs could drastically improve efficiency in apiary departments all across the united states, and even across the world.