Untitled Document
 When
her trainer snaps her fingers, Bobae,
a 7-year-old English Springer spaniel, runs off
to sniff the wooden pillars at Gyeongbok
Palace, the ancient seat of Korea’s royal family and one of the
country’s most important cultural heritage sites.
When Bobae finds what she’s looking for, she calmly sits and stares
at the spot on one of the pillars.
There, her trainer finds what they were looking for: two tiny termites.
A few years ago, when Bobae was living in England, she was trained
to sniff out drugs and other explosives. But now, Bobae
spends her time searching for termites. These insects threaten South Korea’s historic palaces and temples, which are mostly built of wood.
Using two dogs, it takes only two to three hours to check the entire palace. Without the
help of the dogs, the search for termites would
have taken several hours, even days. Gyeongbokgung has 13 main buildings
that cover more than 34 hectares of Seoul.
 The dogs
are trained not to scratch or bite the wood when they detect the termites, to avoid damaging it. During
the training process, trainers
allow the spaniels to smell the termites, which are then hidden so
that the dogs can practice searching until they get it right.
Bobae, and her two companions Woori and Boram,
started working in Korea in 2007. They typically take 10 to 12 trips
a year all over the country. However, Korea could use more sniffer
dogs to guard its wooden cultural treasures.
There are concerns that because Korea’s
climate in the summer is becoming warmer and more humid, the number of termites
might be on the rise.
“It would be much better if we had more dogs helping detection,” said Jang Young-ki,
a specialist at the Cultural Heritage Administration. “There are just
too few of them to cover so many sites. Dog
sniffers are more efficient than other methods are their detection
is very accurate.” |
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