Canine assisted bed bug inspections are not practical for all types of locations; nor are they cost effective for every situation. Knowing when to use highly trained, certified detector dog teams, like those of Green Dog Pest Service, is the key to optimizing your bed bug inspections.
Sadie is on the larger size, but her quiet, passive alert, pin pointing the location of the bed bugs with her nose, makes her an ideal bed bug dog for our program. Sadie has great endurance and can search many units without becoming fatigued. She is just starting her career and is not certified yet. For that reason we are not using her for client inspections, she's just along for training and experience.
- High turn over locations such as hotel and lodging facilities that have many rooms to be inspected are a great place to use detector dogs. Searching 150 hotel rooms with canine teams goes much faster than visual searches and doesn’t require dismantling the room in order to get a thorough search in.
- Locations that offer services to high-risk bed bug victims, like homeless shelters and medical or training facilities that caters to those individuals. We know that bed bugs can be found everywhere, including 5-Star resort hotels, but certain demographics have been proven to have bed bugs more often than others.
- High density housing locations, apartments, condos, SRO and similar multi housing locations are another ideal situation for canine inspections. As we know, not all people react to bed bugs bites and don’t realize they have bed bugs until the infestation is out of control with bugs moving through the wall voids to other units looking for meals. Searching units with canine teams can not only flag hot units, but can be used to rule out adjoining units that may not have any issues.
- Pin pointing areas to treat, when you can’t treat an entire area is an ideal situation to utilize detector dog teams. As an example an Emergency Room in a hospital that has a patient with bed bugs. The entire ER can’t be shut down after the patient leaves. Using canines to pin point locations to treat and to clear other areas allows for the ER to run as close to normal as possible during or after treatment.
- Post treatment inspections are another great way to utilize bed bug detector dogs. Using dogs to search two weeks to one month post treatment can determine if the treatment was successful.
No search option is 100% accurate all of the time. Using canines can be more accurate than visual inspections alone; not to mention more cost effective for large-scale jobs.