Behind the building at Brightleaf Pest Control is one of the nicer dog kennels one would expect to find behind a place of business.
It’s not really a kennel, though. It’s Hunter’s office.
Hunter is a springer spaniel who works for Brightleaf Pest Control doing a very specific job — finding bedbugs.
“During our classes, that was one of the big things. They talked about how canines can be trained just like a drug detection dog,” Michael Johnson, owner of Brightleaf Pest Control, said. “So just learning about them in class, what their accuracy rate is. That was obviously appealing to me (for the dogs) to be able to find them and pinpoint them.”
The training takes about a year, but once complete, the dogs are able to locate bedbugs with an accuracy rate of around 95 percent.
“Basically when the trainer gets them, they just slowly start introducing him to the scent,” Johnson said. “Once he knows the scent, they will train him to do specific things. Like for us, we want them to sit and point with his nose. Once he finds the bedbugs, he will see it, point, then look at you and then point. That’s your cue to know that they’re there.”
At just a year-and-a-half old, Hunter’s not worried about his 401K. Successful jobs lead to time with his favorite toy.
“He won’t let it up,” Johnson said. “When he gets that toy, he doesn’t want to give it away.”
It’s not all work and no play for Hunter, though.
“He stays with me,” his trainer, Teresa Taylor, said. “He comes to work with me in the mornings, and goes home with me in the afternoons. I have a fenced-in backyard. He’s able to run and play. When he’s not working, he’s usually in a pen. And we also provide a place for him at the office where he’s outside and can get fresh air and see the people in the cars as they ride by.
“In the morning, another cool thing is he knows when it’s time to go to work. His demeanor changes. He goes from playing to ready to go to work. So he’s got a certain leash and a collar that he wears, and he knows when those things go on him, it’s time to go to work.”
And, if you ask his boss, he does a good job.
“When he walks in a room, if a bedbug has been in there, the scent will actually cone out, right? So, he knows the scent’s there,” Johnson said. “And you can see his body change, and his hair kind of stands up a little bit. His tail gets stiff and you can tell where he’s trying to find the point of that cone.”
When he’s not on the job, he trains to keep his bedbug hunting skills sharp.
“We train with them just about five days a week,” he said. “We have live bedbugs in tubes that we can train with them. So I’ll go and hide them and won’t tell them where they’re at. (Then) they have to go find them. So we can make sure his accuracy is still there.”
That way, he can get his paws on that toy more often.
