A New Dog Breed of Bedbug Super Sniffers?

03/16/2010

Proud Graduates of the Bed Bug Scent Training Academy

Many of us have seen or heard of bomb sniffing dogs, drug sniffing dogs, cancer sniffing dogs and, of course, the ubiquitous crotch-sniffing dogs. But professionally trained bedbug sniffing dogs? Seriously?

Yes - you read right. Cruiser the bedbug sniffing Puggle and his handler Jeremy Ecker are founders of the Bed Bug Inspectors, a company that inspects hotels, college dorms and office buildings, suburban and luxury homes and apartments for bedbugs. Cruiser and his other canine cohorts are graduates of a bonafide Bed Bug Scent Training Academy and dogs like Cruiser can inspect a room for pests in minutes, whereas lesser mammals like human beings need hours to conduct a visual inspection.

The new and furry front line in an escalating and confounding domestic war on bedbugs

Bedbug-sniffing dogs are adorable yet amazingly accurate and researchers at the University of Florida report that well-trained dogs can detect a single live bug or egg with 96 percent accuracy. Gross, but amazing. 

The Bedbug Inspectors and their special sniffers are particularly busy in highly populated cities like New York, where neighbors are often separated only by bricks and mortar and one person’s infestation is everybody’s problem. Learn more about these specialized sniffers at The New York Times.