Service dog finds bedbugs

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http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200906/bedbugs

 

How man’s best friend can help him evict his nastiest

bedmateby

 

Pamela Paul

 

Dog Bites Bug

 

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The apartment, a vast three-bedroom on the Upper West Side, is the kind

most New Yorkers would clamor to live in, were it not for its current

occupants. Enter Radar the beagle, indifferent to the incongruity between

the space and his mission. “Find the B’s,” instructs his handler, Carl

Massicott of Advanced K9 Detectives, a service based in Milburn,

Connecticut. The apartment’s owner, a father of two who works in finance,

anxiously oversees the investigation. If Radar can pinpoint the source of

the problem, which has plagued the master bedroom for nine months,

targeted applications of pesticide and steam­as opposed to total

fumigation­may yet save the day.

 

 

Pepe Peruyero teaches Nudie,

a Chinese crested terrier mix,

to paw where she finds bedbugs.

Image credit: Eric Zamora

Then, worst fears are realized: Radar halts in front of the 5-year-old’s

bedroom closet. Tupperware boxes containing the trappings of childhood

are methodically withdrawn­a bin of Legos here, blocks there. Radar

sniffs right by them, then decisively paws a shoebox. Sure enough, a

single bedbug, plump with blood, is hunkered down within. “This one’s fed

recently,” Massicott confirms, while the apartment owner runs his fingers

through his hair, stricken. Radar, wagging his tail, accepts a bit of

kibble as a reward.

Radar’s professionalism is a testament to Pepe Peruyero, owner of J &

K Canine Academy in High Springs, Florida, who trained the dog for four

months, then sold him to Advanced K9 for $9,500. (“That includes a week

of handler training,” Peruyero explains. “It’s a package deal.”) Peruyero

boasts that his program trains dogs to distinguish the legitimate threats

of live bugs and eggs from the dead bugs, cast skins, hatched eggs, and

fecal matter whose detection can prompt unnecessary pest bombing.

 

Bedbugs, largely eliminated from developed countries after World War II,

are back, and harder to kill than ever. The less-than-quarter-inch bugs

and their miniscule eggs live in mattresses, books, crevices in the

floor. The little suckers (pun, alas, intended) can go more than a year

without feeding. And unlike termites, which cluster in the thousands,

bedbugs can make trouble in very small numbers; if a single female

survives an extermination, she and her hatching eggs will reinfest the

space. Pest-control companies consider bedbugs their biggest challenge.

After the banning of DDT and other harsh pesticides, exterminators have

had to rely on something called

 

Integrated Pest Management, an “environmentally sensitive,”

multipronged approach. They can, for example, bake bugs to death by

warming a room to 130 degrees using industrial-strength heaters; use mega

vacuum cleaners to suck the bugs out; or apply Cryonite, a carbon-dioxide

snow that freezes the fluids in the insects’ cells, causing instant

death.

Bedbug dogs don’t actually do anything to bedbugs. But if the idea

is to use less pesticide, dogs may be your best bet. A controlled

experiment by entomologists at the University of Florida found that dogs

were 98 percent accurate in locating live bedbugs in hotel rooms. In a

hotel or apartment building, dogs can determine which rooms require

attention, avoiding the telltale stench of mass fumigation and saving

thousands of dollars by treating only the affected rooms. (Not that the

dogs are cheap: they typically cost about $325 an hour.) According to

recent field research, one trained dog-and-handler team is more effective

at detection than trained humans alone, and accomplishes the job in

significantly less time.

“You see this?” says John Russell of New Jersey’s Action Termite &

Pest Control, pointing into an overstuffed Manhattan closet where one of

his dogs, a black Lab named Sara, has indicated a problem. “Clutter!

That’s why bedbugs are so hard to find.” The apartment’s tenant, who has

lived in his one-bedroom for 34 years, hovers nearby. When Sara noses one

of the many jackets within, the tenant grabs it. “I’ll just throw it

out,” he says, ushering the garment into the hallway.

Sara isn’t one of Peruyero’s dogs, but a graduate of a competing outfit,

the Florida Canine Academy, which claims to have been the first to enter

the bedbug business, and also certifies teams to detect bombs, drugs,

money, weapons, termites, and arson. Florida Canine’s trainees, selected

for their work ethic, drive, and desire to please, are taught to gesture

with their nose, because, “dogs who give the paw,” the owner, Bill

Whitstine, says scornfully, “can scratch furniture or end up spreading

the bugs around.”

Rival trainers commonly accuse each other of failure to teach dogs to

distinguish between live and dead bugs. The National Entomology Scent

Detection Canine Association sprang up in 2006, partly in response to

“false alerting” problems among bug-sniffing dogs. “We were really

concerned that a few dogs improperly trained could tarnish the whole

industry,” the president, J. Louis Witherington, told me. Still,

disagreement persists about the best way to train and accredit bedbug

dogs.

“A lot of programs have been successful training narcotic dogs, bomb

dogs, arson dogs,” Peruyero says. “But it’s a totally different world

with bedbug dogs. The only thing tougher is training dogs to detect

melanoma.”

Pamela Paul is the author, most recently, of

 

Parenting, Inc.

 

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