It can tell you what they have eaten, how long ago they were in the area, where the animal came from, whether the animal is a male or female (by extracting the hormones), the health of the animal (through analysis), and many other facts! By collecting the fecal samples in bulk, it is easy to get an idea of how many individual animals there are in an area as well as collecting all of these extra bits of information about them for research!
In order to do this, CCF employed some expert sniffers-dogs! Dogs have an amazing sense of smell (much higher than a human's), and they can easily be trained to sniff out different objects or samples, including scat! CCF has several scat dogs on the property in Namibia, and our trainer Tim Hofmann. Hofmann works with them every single day to keep them sharp. The animals are trained by using a "line up" of boxes with different scat samples. Five boxes will be lined up, each containing a different animal's scat underneath. When the dog is given the command to "search," they will smell each of the boxes and "signal" (sit next to) the box containing cheetah scat. When the dog chooses correctly, they are rewarded with a toy and some play to show that they've done a good job. This tactic can be used in the wild and in an unknown area for the dogs to find wild cheetah scat, and allow the researchers to take samples to bring back to CCF for analysis.
The more we know about cheetahs, the more we can do to help them. Without the dogs, this job would be a much harder job!
