FROM ZERO TO HERO: HOW BEAR THE DOG WENT FROM BEING A TERRIBLE PET TO SEARCHING FOR KOALA BUSHFIRE VICTIMS

Everything that made Bear the dog a terrible pet has made him a bushfire hero.

The Australian Koolie has boundless energy, an inquisitive nature, intelligence and a great nose for sniffing out trouble.

It was too much for his previous owners, who decided they could no longer keep him after he literally ate their apartment, chewing through furniture and walls out of boredom.

He ended up with the Detection Dogs for Conservation program at the University of the Sunshine Coast, where he has become a trained koala detection dog.

He is the only one of his kind trained to track live koalas rather than droppings, known as scat.

Decked out in special boots to protect his feet from the scorched ground, Bear has been searching for koala victims of the bushfires that have been devastating Australia’s east coast in recent weeks.

“The dog’s nose is incredibly good at looking at the picture of a scene and identifying every part of that picture,” ecologist and post-doctoral research fellow Dr Romane Cristescu told 9news.com.au.

She said the characteristics that made Bear a troublesome pet are the same ones that make him a talented detection dog. “A lot of those amazingly skilled dogs do end up in the pound,” Dr Cristescu said. “Finding Bear was very lucky for us and for him. “He is obsessed with playing all day long, and we want to be collecting data all day long.”

All of the dogs employed in the program have a relentless desire to work. Most koala detection dogs are trained to detect scat. Some zero in on only the freshest scat, allowing researchers to obtain DNA and information about pathogens like chlamydia. This means researchers can more easily track koala habitats and distribution as well as genetic diversity.

But Bear tracks the live koalas, following their scent from the tops of the tallest trees, even when those trees have been razed by flames.

Searching for injured wildlife is hard and distressing work for conservation groups like Queensland Koala Crusaders, Wildcare Australia and Friends of the Koala, who work tirelessly to protect Australian wildlife.

Bear’s skills make it just that bit easier. “Bear is deployed less often for research but when a natural disaster happens like these fires what we want is to find an animal, not scat, so we can find any that may possibly have injuries,” she said.

Detection Dogs for Conservation was founded in 2016, in partnership with the International Fund for Animal Welfare. 

The world’s first koala detection dog is believed to have been a black Labrador-cross-border collie named Oscar, trained by his handler Jim Shields who hid toy koalas up trees after they’d been rubbed on the bellies of real koalas.