Hello and welcome to the K9 Conservationists Podcast!
We’ve got a new name! As our loyal listeners know, we recently lost my beloved cohost Ursa. After giving it a LOT of thought, I’ve decided to pivot the focus of this podcast. Rather than focusing broadly on dog behavior, the K9 Conservationists podcast will focus on the field of conservation detection dogs. We’ll interview wildlife biologists, community scientists, dog behavior researchers, and handlers throughout this amazing field.
I hope that you decide to stick along for the ride. I plan to bring the same level of enthusiasm, nerdiness, and dog-centric thinking to this endeavor. I’ve got episodes in the works: on the humane hierarchy with Dr. Susan Friedman, the body language of scentwork with Steve White, a fascinating episode on combining thermal imaging and scent detection dogs, and SO MUCH MORE.
I really, truly want to thank all of our listeners for the support thus far. I dearly love Canine Conversations and will miss producing it, but my long-term career goals are firmly oriented towards conservation detection dog work. Journey Dog Training will still be here to provide support in the form of phone calls, courses, webinars, and free blogs, but more and more of MY time will focus on conservation detection dog work.
To that end, I’m thrilled to announce the launch of the K9 Conservationists nonprofit. We just filed for 501(c)3 status and hope that you’ll continue supporting this podcast and the nonprofit through Patreon. This will help us cover the costs of not only this podcast, but also our new field vehicle that lets Barley, Niffler, and I do our important work. Once we’ve paid off the vehicle, supporters of the nonprofit can expect to help us offer subsidies on our consultant services. That will help us get involved in amazing projects that might not have been able to afford conservation detection dogs otherwise!
So with all those announcements out of the way, let’s do a quick refresher. What the heck IS a conservation detection dog? How do you get involved? What’s the work like? How do you select a dog for this work? We’ll cover all of this in much more detail going forward, but I’ll get the basics out of the way here.
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