You wake to tiny red bites along your arm and panic overwhelms you: You have bedbugs. Before calling pest control, The Atlantic reports that you could consider employing a bedbug dog, trained to sniff out the critters and their eggs.
Bedbugs’ tiny size, and their ability to survive more than a year without food, make them a tricky pest to purge. Now that nasty pesticides like DDT have fallen out of favor, pest control companies are using more “environmentally sensitive”–and admittedly less mighty–methods to control the bugs. Dogs can thus save time, headache, and unnecessary treatment by accurately deciphering pest problems before taking action. In fact, The Atlantic reports that “A controlled experiment by entomologists at the University of Florida found that dogs were 98 percent accurate in locating live bedbugs in hotel rooms.”
For more on eco-friendly bug killers, read about pest control with a conscience from Utne Reader‘s January-February 2008 issue.
Source: The Atlantic
Image by Pink Sherbet Photography, licensed under Creative Commons.
