(birds chirping) - [Narrator] One of the hardest parts about studying and protecting endangered species is simply finding them.

- Did you put the samples up there?

- [Narrator] That's where Rogue Detection Teams come in.

The teams are made up of human handlers, or what they call bounders, and trained rescue dogs.

- You should see Pips right now.

He's just pressing his nose up against the crate.

He goes, "Let me out."

- [Narrator] Today they're taking us along is they search for one of the most elusive animals in the Northwest, wolves.

It might seem an impossible task.

A wolf pack can range over hundreds of miles.

- [Heath] You ready?

Let's go find 'em.

- [Narrator] Fortunately, we're looking for something a little easier to find, the poop the wolves leave behind.

- Coming out here, you wouldn't know where to start, and it's kind of like finding a needle in a bit of a hay field.

- [Narrator] It might sound silly, but poop, or what researchers call scat, is a powerful tool for monitoring animals that are hard to find.

It can tell us how many there are, where they go, what they eat, and if they're healthy and reproducing.

And dogs, of course, are experts at sniffing it out.

- [Heath] (whistles) This is the Pips.

He's done a lot of amazing projects.

He's worked on fishers and martens and badgers, caterpillars.

He's a stocky little tank that just wants to go, go, go.

Let's go find it.

There should be quite a bit out here.

- Famous last words.

- I know it.

- [Narrator] Humans have long relied on dogs' incredible sense of smell.

What sets the Rogue Detection Teams apart is that they only work with the rescue dogs that other people reject for one very particular reason, they are obsessed with fetch.

(dog barking) - [Heath] They get this kind of crazy eyes that you want to see.

That fetch obsession really is our method of communicating with them.

So since they love this more than anything else, teaching them another odor takes 15 minutes.

- The way it works is they put out empty jars and then one jar of whatever they want the dog to detect.

This is Wolf scat, but the process works with anything from invasive mussels to diseased plants.

- This is a new one.

Ready?

I'll bring Filson out, the dog I'll be working, and I'll ask him to sniff the holes.

And when he gets to the sample, I'll just kind of toss a ball and make it really fun.

Atta boy, way to go!

What'd you get there?

And then as we go through it a few more times, I'll eventually ask him to sit, and that will tell him that my expectation for his alert is to sit.

Sit.

Nice job.

Way to go.

- And then when we're out in the wild and I have no idea where the poop is, I haven't put it out at all for him.

I'll know he's at of sample because we followed the steps and stages to get to that point.

Get it.

Did you find a poopers?

- [Heath] Yeah, nice job.

Let's go find it.

- [Narrator] And that takes us back to our search for wolf poop.

- Oh, he's onto somethin'.

What you got?

Show me.

Atta boy.

(Jennifer chuckling) Oh, that's a nice scat.

Go get some more.

- [Narrator] If they were working on a research project, they'd send the poop off to a lab, but today they're just collecting it because, well, they need a library of rare animal scat to keep their dogs up to snuff.

- This is like a hairy gold for us.

(chuckles) - [Narrator] Heath got his start working with detection dogs in 2001, and he went on to help build a program at the University of Washington called Conservation Canines.

- When I started 20 years ago, we were doing some stuff in the Canadian Rockies.

And I got in this habit of just going out, like I didn't even take a tent and curlin' up under a tree with a dog, and my mom thinks I'm more of a dog than a human.

In fact, when I go home, I end up sleeping on the floor a lot of times to be closer to the dogs than sleeping in the nice comfy bed.

- [Narrator] Over the years, the program's teams have traveled around the globe.

They've worked with conservation groups, scientists, and wildlife agencies to survey for everything from tigers to pangolin.

- Where do dogs fit in the conservation world?

You know, just about any place.

I'm constantly surprised by their ability to smell things.

PCBs, viruses, areas where an animal's landed or laid down.

It's unlimited.

If you figure out how to teach 'em that odor, then they'll find it.

(birds chirping) (dog barks) - When I'm out of the field and on the property, I live in a yurt, and we have anywhere between five to six dogs in the yurt with us.

And first thing in the morning, we'll let the dogs out on a break and then they get fed.

And then we'll usually go on a morning walk.

Filly, this way.

Filson is my newest recruit.

What was really fun about working in Yosemite with him on our first project was just discovering Filson.

Every day was just learning something new, and he was just a tough little nugget.

He actually found the two fisher scat samples that are the first found north of the Merced River in over a hundred years.

He was trained on fisher, but I wasn't expecting to find fisher in this area 'cause everyone had said, there's no Fisher here.

And it's just like the sense of like pride and joy to, wow, he did that, you know?

I had nothing to do with it.

(laughs) - [Narrator] This is the point where you're probably thinking, "Their job sounds mighty, romantic," but while they can work with any breed of dog, they've learned that it takes a special breed of humans to spend months in the field alone, backpacking through rugged remote terrain and crawling through leech infested jungles with fetch obsessed rescue dogs.

- [Jake] Ranger, stop.

- [Narrator] Jake Lammi applied to work with the program five years ago.

He was one of 10 candidates invited to a screening workshop of sorts.

- It was basically a Hunger Games is how I kind of like to tell it because our first day he took us on like a 17 mile hike in the rain, made sure like our boots were like full of water and stuff like that.

It was kind of like weeding out people a little bit at first because if you can't do that on your own, no way you're gonna be able to it with a dog.

Then people start self-selecting out, and then after a month they ended up hiring two of us, and that was when I went on my first project with Ranger, the primary dog that I work with.

- [Narrator] It's the kind of job the becomes your life.

But after years of living out of their cars and shared university housing, they realized they needed a permanent home.

- I think what made us fall in love with this area is we're in the Columbia River valley, and I mean the river kind of supports a really special ecosystem, so we have grizzly bears, there's cougars.

We had one on our property.

We can see their prints.

To think that we could even live here was like magical.

So then when we came up here our first day on this hike, I think we were just like this, this spot, we have to.

- [Narrator] So in 2019, Heath bought this property.

(door creaking) Seven humans and 16 dogs, then moved in to start a new company, Rogue Detection Teams.

- Good job, way to go!

Good boy.

I have four dogs in my house.

Do you like how I pause?

'Cause sometimes I have five, and so dogs and teams will leave, and whoever is here is left to take care of whomever is not on a project.

(dogs barking) - [Narrator] Watching the dogs play it's easy to see why the team gravitated to the name Rogue.

- We have a dog that plays with a metal food dish.

(dog barking) We have a dog that's like a chihuahua mix, a rat terrier, something.

They don't all kind of fit the mold for what a lot of people view a detection dog as.

They're not all high drive labs.

They come in all shapes and sizes and they're all rescue dogs, they're all from shelters, and that's something that we think is really important.

- [Narrator] The title of Rogue doesn't just apply to the dogs though.

Many of the humans also identify as introverts, nomads, and rogues.

- [Suzie] Doesn't that look more refreshing?

- [Narrator] It makes for a strange pack, a bunch of dog loving loners living together in the middle of nowhere.

- Living with eight or nine people together in like a, it's not quite a commune, but it can feel similar at times.

It's definitely never something that I really thought I would do.

- Cheers!

- Cheers!

- [Suzie] To us actually all being together for a little while.

- [Jake] All right big guy.

All right we're here.

- [Narrator] Going forward, the Rogues are excited about expanding the ways that dogs can contribute to conservation research, as well as bringing the dogs into classrooms, to teach kids about science.

- Good job, nice work.

- The dogs and the stories are really good to engage students with conservation.

But the narrative that comes along with these dogs that were homeless, that now travel to Vietnam and Nepal and kids were like, "What?"

It just gives them this desire to dream a little bit bigger or think a little bit differently.

Slow.

- The dogs also push scientists to think differently, and they certainly help the Rogues to dream a little bit bigger themselves.

- Here.

(whistles) The dogs that I work with and the communication that happens and that connection is incredible.

It's the coolest thing in the world.

Good job, buddy.

Ready?