People cannot save everything. Try as best we can (and some of us don’t even bother to try), there will always be the threatened species need to save. Fortunately it appears dogs can sometimes be even better environmentalists than humans.

One of those four-legged models is a rescue dog named Eba who rescues killer whales off the coast of Washington state. When Dr. Deborah Giles, a killer whale researcher at the University of Washington’s Center for Conservation Biology, adopted her, she had no idea Eba would become a conservation dog.

How? ‘Or’ What? With its super sniffer. It turns out that dogs can be trained to detect wild animal droppings. (When they find it, they can play with a toy.) Feces can tell researchers about many things, such as an animal’s recent meals, the presence of chemicals or pollutants, stress level, and state of pregnancy.

“This is where the dog comes in because he can smell these things from a mile away – literally a mile away,” Dr. Giles said. Today.

On her second day on the water, Eba found whale droppings. This information derived from the feces helps environmentalists and lawmakers give whales wide breadth so as not to disturb them.

“It helps answer questions that will help recover an endangered species of beloved animals,” said Dr. Giles.

Eba is a natural. He is also a rising celebrity. She will be featured in the next PBS series The age of nature told by none other than Uma Thurman. She also has her own social media and website (Eba, not Uma, that is).

For a dog who was thrown like a puppy outside an animal shelter in Sacramento, Calif., Wet and cold and weighing just 3½ pounds (she now weighs 30), that’s quite a feat. Eba was saved and now she is saving others. If only humans could live with this kind of attitude, what a wonderful world it would be.

Cover photo: UW / Center for Conservation Biology

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