Conservation Canines by Isabelle Groc

Author:Isabelle Groc
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781459821620
Publisher: Orca Book Publishers
Published: 2021-07-05T17:37:40+00:00

RITA AND HERA

At age 14, Rita Santos was spending more time at the local dog shelter than at school in her home city of Lisbon, Portugal. Santos loved animals and volunteered every day to look after abandoned dogs, cleaning their kennels, feeding them, taking them for walks and giving them medication. Spending quality time with the dogs at the shelter helped the teenager get through a difficult time in her life, when she felt lonely and out of place in a new high school she did not like. The dogs helped Santos as much as she helped them. Sometimes she just sat with the dogs and watched them play. Every time she took a dog out of a kennel to go for a walk, she noticed its “smile” and how happy it was to enjoy a moment outside.

Over time Santos developed a real expertise in training dogs, and then one day she met Heath Smith, who had come to the shelter where she worked. He was in Portugal looking for dogs to support a new wolf study in partnership with Conservation Canines in the United States and the nonprofit group Grupo Lobo in Portugal.

At the shelter Smith became interested in a dog named Zeus, and he asked Santos for help. This marked the start of a new career for her as a conservation dog handler. She was just finishing high school in 2013 when she began an eight-month stint surveying areas in Central Portugal with the dog, looking for wolf poop. The objective of the study was to find out whether the Douro River was a natural barrier for wolves in the Portuguese landscape. If wolves are able to cross the river, they can expand their territories, find more wild prey and breed with animals south of the river, which improves genetic diversity.

Raised in Lisbon, a big city, Santos initially had a hard time working in the field, following the dog in the woods and learning about local wildlife. But she loves the job!

In 2017 Santos adopted Hera, a two-year-old street dog. Hera had been rescued as a puppy and placed in a shelter. She was adopted when she was six months old, but a few weeks later the new owners returned her because she was too much to handle. Hera had lots of energy and had destroyed everything in the house. She stayed at the shelter until Santos finally discovered her. Santos needed a new conservation detection dog, and Hera was the perfect match.

At first Hera was shy and uncomfortable around people, but she had a lot of potential. “As soon as you took the ball out, she did not care about the world anymore. She was really focused,” Santos remembers. The pair is now a winning team, working for wildlife conservation groups across Europe. They have been on many adventures together, from searching for turtle nests in the South of France to looking for brown bears in the Pyrenees to combing the Crau plain of southeastern France to

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