Canine detection for biodiversity protection: a multispecies approach to promote conservation and prevent wildlife trafficking.

The Colombian National Police (CNP) has canine teams specialized for detecting mammals, reptiles, and birds illegally trafficked by national and transnational criminal organizations. The objectives are to: (1) establish standards for the scent database, training protocol, and certification of canine teams for wildlife detection; and (2) determine dog sensitivity and specificity in discriminating between target and decoy scents through a double-blind test during the certification of animal scent detection dogs. The methodology initially involved 22 dogs; a structured screening process, based on behavioral suitability, trainability, and preliminary scent discrimination performance, reduced the cohort to four dogs that met the required operational criteria. These dogs conducted three tests daily for 3 days, to discriminate between target and decoy scents, including horsehair, dog and cat food, pig hooves, beef, and chicken feathers. A double-blind test was performed to assess evaluator agreement (Cohen's Kappa), as well as diagnostic performance, where sensitivity was defined as the proportion of correctly identified true positives (excluding false-negatives) and specificity as the proportion of correctly rejected true negatives (excluding false-positives), with false-positives and false-negatives recorded accordingly. The four dogs achieved near-perfect agreement (0.95-1.00) for the scents of feathers from the