Jobs Dogs Do, From Guide Dogs to Truffle Hunters

A guide dog does not read traffic lights. Its handler listens to the traffic and decides when to cross; the dog holds a straight line, stops at kerbs and steps, steers round obstacles including ones at head height, and refuses a command that would walk its handler into danger, a skill trainers call intelligent disobedience. In New Zealand, puppies spend about a year with volunteer raisers before around six months of formal training, and Labradors, Golden Retrievers and crosses of the two fill most harnesses.

This job is done by touch. When the doorbell, alarm clock or oven timer goes off, a hearing dog nudges or paws its deaf owner and then leads them to the sound. Fire and smoke alarms get a different response, because leading someone towards a fire would be dangerous: the dog lies down instead as a warning. Programmes train a wide mix of breeds and crosses, from spaniels and poodles to Labradors, since the role rewards alertness more than size.

For someone who uses a wheelchair or has limited strength, a mobility dog picks up dropped keys and phones, opens and closes doors, presses lift buttons and can help pull off a jacket or empty a washing machine. Dogs that brace a person while they stand or steady their balance need to be big, sturdy and cleared by a vet for joint problems, which is why Labradors and Golden Retrievers dominate the role. Each dog's task list is built around one person's daily routine.

Usually Labradors or other retrievers, these dogs learn the scent of their person's breath or sweat when blood sugar runs low or high, then alert when they catch it again, including at night. Some individual dogs are impressively reliable, but studies that checked alerts against masked glucose monitors found accuracy varied widely between dogs and was often modest. That is why they work alongside a continuous glucose monitor, never in place of one.

The well-established part of this job begins once a seizure has started: the dog fetches another person, presses an alarm button, stays beside its person and keeps them company as they come round. Predicting seizures is a different matter. Some dogs seem to alert beforehand without being taught, but nobody has a reliable way to train that ability, and epilepsy organisations urge caution about any programme that promises it.

Often partnered with people living with PTSD, severe anxiety or other psychiatric conditions, these dogs learn specific tasks: waking someone from a nightmare, interrupting a panic attack or repetitive behaviour, applying calming pressure by lying across a lap, or standing between their person and a crowd. Those trained tasks are what separate them from emotional support animals, which help simply by being there and, in the United States among other places, lack the same public access rights.

For a child who may bolt towards a road, the dog works as a safety anchor. The child wears a belt clipped to the dog's harness, a parent holds the lead, and the dog is trained to plant itself and sit if the child tries to run. A familiar dog alongside can also make busy outings less overwhelming for some children. Families and trainers are candid about the limits: the arrangement only works if the child will keep the belt on.

Therapy dogs visit the people they help rather than living with them: rest homes, hospital wards, hospices, schools and university exam weeks. They need a calm, people-loving temperament and pass an assessment with their owner, but they are pets on a volunteer visit, not assistance dogs, and they do not share the legal access rights of guide or hearing dogs. Reading programmes, where children practise reading aloud to an uncritical listener, are one of the role's most popular uses.

Few dog jobs ask for more stillness. A courthouse facility dog sits with children and vulnerable witnesses during police interviews and while they wait at court, and, where a judge allows it, lies at their feet while they give evidence. The practice grew out of a Seattle prosecutor's office in the early 2000s and has since spread across the United States and to other countries. The dogs come from accredited assistance-dog organisations, usually calm retrievers that can stay settled through hours of difficult testimony.

Search and rescue dogs find people who are lost or trapped. Air-scent dogs range off lead across bush and hillside, working the wind for any human scent, while trailing dogs follow one particular person's track from where they were last seen, and urban teams search collapsed buildings. In New Zealand a LandSAR dog and handler usually train for around two years before passing an operational assessment, then are reassessed every year. Border Collies, Labradors, German Shepherds and Malinois are common, but drive and fitness count for more than pedigree.

Speed is the whole point of this job. The chance of surviving a complete avalanche burial drops steeply after about 15 minutes, and a trained dog, often a shepherd, retriever or Border Collie, can cover a debris field far faster than a line of people probing the snow. Many handlers are ski patrollers, and the dogs learn to ride chairlifts, snowmobiles and helicopters so the team can reach a slide quickly.

Italy shows this job at its most developed. Dogs certified by the Scuola Italiana Cani Salvataggio patrol busy beaches in summer with their handlers, swimming out to struggling swimmers and, after around three years of training, jumping from boats and helicopters. A tired swimmer holds the dog's harness and is towed in, leaving the handler free to help. Newfoundlands, bred for powerful swimming and a heavy, water-resistant build, are the classic choice, with Labradors and Golden Retrievers also trained.

Often called cadaver dogs, these spaniels, Labradors and German Shepherds are trained on the scent of human decomposition and help police when a missing person is thought to have died, including remains that are buried, scattered or underwater, where a dog may work from the bow of a boat. The alert narrows the search area rather than proving anything on its own, so finds are confirmed by excavation and forensic testing. A sombre job, but one that can give families an answer.

Labradors, spaniels and Malinois do much of this work, finding explosives, drugs, firearms and cash in luggage, vehicles, buildings and crowds for police, customs and armed forces. Explosives dogs give a passive alert, usually sitting still, rather than scratching at something that might go off. They are very good but not infallible: in a 2011 study, teams falsely told that a target scent might be hidden made more than 200 alerts where there was nothing to find, a reminder of how much a handler's expectations can sway a dog.

At New Zealand's airports and mail centres, these dogs sniff passengers, bags and parcels for fruit, meat, seeds and plants that could carry pests or disease into the country. The Ministry for Primary Industries has used beagles since 1996, since a small, friendly dog unsettles travellers less, and Labradors are widely used too; both sit quietly beside a suspect item rather than scratching at it. Dogs can find seeds and plant material that X-ray screening misses, which is why Australia, the United States and others run similar teams.

After a suspicious fire, these dogs work through the burnt-out scene for traces of petrol, lighter fluid and other accelerants, sitting to mark each spot. That lets an investigator take samples from exactly the right places for laboratory testing, which confirms or rules out arson; the alert alone is not treated as proof. In the United States, an insurance-funded programme has trained hundreds of these teams since 1993, mostly Labradors and Labrador crosses living with a firefighter or police officer.

For now this is mainly research work. Dogs are trained to sniff samples such as urine, breath or skin swabs in a lab and indicate the ones carrying the odour of a disease, with studies on certain cancers, Parkinson's, malaria and Covid-19. Some results are striking, yet the dogs are not a diagnostic service, and one aim of the research is to help scientists identify the odour compounds involved so that an electronic test can do the job at scale.

Some find the animals conservation workers need to count or move; others hunt down the predators that threaten them. New Zealand's Conservation Dogs Programme certifies more than 120 dog and handler teams to locate kiwi, kākāpō, whio and takahē, or to detect rats, stoats, cats and other pests, and the dogs wear muzzles when working where protected birds live. Certification for a target species takes around 18 months of daily training, and breeds range from pointers to terriers.

General-purpose police dogs track offenders from a scene, search buildings and open ground, find dropped property and, when needed, detain a suspect on command. That last part carries real risk to everyone involved, so the recall, stopping instantly when told, is drilled as hard as the bite. New Zealand Police breed their own German Shepherds for patrol work, starting training at about eight weeks and graduating dogs at around 18 months, while Labradors and Springer Spaniels serve as detector dogs.

Armed forces use dogs to guard bases, patrol, sniff out explosives and roadside bombs, and support special forces operations. Belgian Malinois and German Shepherds dominate, and in the United States the dogs are trained at Joint Base San Antonio-Lackland in Texas. Their welfare after service has improved markedly: since a 2000 law known as Robby's Law, retired US military dogs can be adopted, often by former handlers, instead of being put down.

German Shepherds, Rottweilers, Dobermanns and Malinois are typical guard dogs, protecting property rather than people or livestock: patrolling warehouses, building sites and other premises with a security handler, or barking a warning and standing their ground against intruders. The good ones are confident but controlled, because a dog that bites indiscriminately is a liability. In the UK, the Guard Dogs Act requires a working guard dog to be under its handler's control or secured, with warning notices posted.

Herding dogs move livestock where the farmer wants it, and they split broadly into those that gather stock quietly with an intense stare and those that drive it with noise and pressure. New Zealand hill country uses both: the Border Collie-type heading dog runs wide to bring sheep back, while the Huntaway pushes them up steep faces by barking, a breed the New Zealand Kennel Club recognised in 2013. The job asks for stamina, instant response to whistles and the judgement to work stock at a distance.

Unlike herding dogs, guardians do not move stock; they live with it. Raised among sheep, goats or poultry from puppyhood, breeds such as the Maremma, Great Pyrenees and Anatolian Shepherd stay with the flock day and night and deter foxes, wolves and other predators mainly through presence and barking. The best-known example is Australia's Middle Island, where Maremmas placed from 2006 helped a little penguin colony that had fallen to fewer than ten birds recover to well over a hundred.

Truffles ripen underground, and a dog is trained to find them by their aroma and mark the spot so the hunter can dig carefully. Dogs have largely replaced pigs, which tend to eat the prize and churn up the ground; Italy banned truffle hunting with pigs in 1985 because the digging damaged the fungus beneath. The curly-coated Lagotto Romagnolo is the specialist breed, though Labradors and plenty of mixed breeds work truffle orchards from Italy to New Zealand.