Posted on November 30, 2011 by: WayCoolDogs

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One of the most festive long-distance travelers on Thanksgiving Day is the little bed bug, furtively accompanying holiday travelers while hidden inside overly loaded luggage and small bags.

It’s pretty tough to actually see bed bugs, as they are small in size—3/16-inch or about the size of an apple seed. Indistinguishable to the human eye, a bed bug dog inspection is the easiest way to find this little creepy-crawly, mainly because of the dog’s acute sense of smell.

The  rising sales of specially trained dogs for bed bug dog inspection has a lot to do with the rising numbers of bed bugs as they travel across the nation by droves.

Bedbug-sniffing dogs, adorable yet stunningly accurate — entomology researchers at the University of Florida report that well-trained dogs can detect a single live bug or egg with 96 percent accuracy — are the new and furry front line in an escalating and confounding domestic war.

The reason bed bug dog inspection works so well with the famous bed bug sniffing dogs is that the bugs give off a very sweet yet unpleasant odor. I know….that does not make much sense, but they give off a musky stink-bug scent. The stronger the smell, the larger the bug infestation.

Additionally, they may appear undetectable  visually, but they stay very close together in groups and leave large amounts of blood spattering on mattresses and furnishings. The more bugs in an area, the easier it will be to see the blood or allow the bed bug dogs to detect the odor of the unwanted guests.

About the bed bug

Also spelled as bedbug, this annoying small pest is very flat and oval. The bed bug is reddish-brown in color unless it has fed on the blood of its human travelers, causing its body to distend and change the body color to more of a reddish shade. It will feed on any warm-blooded host, not just humans, such as dogs or cats.

Image: iStockphoto/Fenne Kustermans

These nocturnal, wingless bed bugs love to hide in mattress seams, sheets, furniture, picture frames, electrical outlet plates, cracks, and crevices. The fact their bodies are so thin and flat makes it difficult to find them until you wake up all bitten up. Their favorite establishment has long been the hotels, as they travel in luggage, moving freely from room to room.

Bed bug sniffing dogs

Many people have said that the Lab is the best dog for bed bug dog inspection, and they are. Labradors are intelligent and easy to train, used as some of the best search-and-rescue or therapy dogs in the world. In fact, the Lab is one of the “top 3 among service and scent detection dogs.” (SniffsK9s)

However, bed bug dog trainers are a breed of their own, as training a dog to find a teeny-weeny bug is a whole lot different than catching the scent of an entire human body under earthquake rubble.

News came out the other day in the New York Times about a beg bug sniffing dog that was a puggle (half pug and half poodle), called “the new breed of bed bug guard-dog.”

But with cities like New York in drastic trouble because of the rapid increase in global travel that is bringing them into the United States, it soon will not matter what breed of dog it is, as long as they can find bed bugs to root them out.

New York Bed Bug Problem

Consider that six years ago, there were 537 bedbug complaints and 82 violations (in other words, verified infestations); last year, complaints topped out at nearly 11,000, with 4,084 violations cited (nearly double that of the previous year).