“DON'T LET THE BEDBUGS BITE: Local company trains dogs to uncover infestations (VIDEO)” |
| DON'T LET THE BEDBUGS BITE: Local company trains dogs to uncover infestations (VIDEO) Posted: 19 Feb 2011 05:49 PM PST MIRAMAR BEACH — "Good night, sleep tight, don't let the bedbugs bite" used to be what parents would tell their children. Nowadays, there's a serious risk of those bedbugs actually biting, as an outbreak of the tiny parasitic insects has broken out in the Northeast. A new company in Miramar Beach was started recently to help prevent that outbreak from heading south. Jeremy Hunter recently returned from two tours in Afghanistan, where he was a bomb-dog handler and trainer. He started Affinity K-9 in December. The company uses four dogs trained to detect the smell of bedbugs — similar to how dogs are trained to sniff out narcotics and explosives — and alert its handler of their presence. "Obviously in Afghanistan, if I don't know how to (read a dog's behavior) and I fail at my job, the outcome could be catastrophic," Hunter said. "It could cost people their lives. After doing two tours it didn't cost me mine, so I'd venture to say I'm pretty good at reading dog behavior. "Although we're not looking for bombs, with this avenue of my company it could still be catastrophic to a business owner," Hunter said. A recent University of Florida study determined dogs were 95 percent accurate in detecting the smell of bedbugs if trained correctly, whereas the human eye is only 17 to 19 percent accurate. In order to train the dogs to alert to bedbugs, Hunter has to keep bedbugs on site. He raises his own, and lets the blood-sucking insects feed on him. "The dogs are proven," Hunter said. "The bedbugs put off an odor just like marijuana, cocaine, TNT, C-4, whatever. They contain odors and that's how the dog finds them. We just imprint that odor into the dogs like we would the narcotics or the explosives, and the reaction is the same. You get a positive response when they get in the source of the odor." Affinity K-9 strictly is a bedbug detection company. If one of the dogs gives a positive alert of bedbugs and their presence is confirmed, the company recommends the client contact a pest control company. Jennifer Hunter, Jeremy's wife and co-owner of the business, said they hope local hotels and condominiums, as well as apartment complexes and homeowners, have their property tested regularly. "We want the hotels to be ahead of what happened in New York," Jennifer Hunter said. "They totally waited until people were getting eaten up by bugs before they started doing anything." Purchasing fully-trained dogs for a service like this can cost between $7,000 and $10,000 each. Instead, Jeremy Hunter has trained the dogs himself, spending at least 400 hours with each one. Affinity has four dogs, each about a year old. The two breeds Jeremy Hunter has selected are Dutch shepherds and Belgian malinois. "The reason I went with (those breeds) is because they come from working bloodlines," he said. "All the dogs I purchased, their mothers and fathers and grandmothers and grandfathers were all police dogs, so they all have that inherent ability to want to work for that toy reward." This entry passed through the Full-Text RSS service — if this is your content and you're reading it on someone else's site, please read our FAQ page at fivefilters.org/content-only/faq.php |
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