Quote:

---

Andrew Luck-Baker spends a day on a motor boat with Tucker the sniffer dog and a team of zoologists in search of killer whale dung, floating in the waters off the North American Pacific coast. Tucker is a black Labrador. He is one of an elite team of detection dogs, trained to find the faeces of threatened animals in the cause of conservation.

A lump of faeces is packed with information about an animal's stress levels, fertility, nutritional status and exposure to chemical pollution. There is no other way to reap this data from living whales because whales spend most of their lives underwater. Tucker's work means the scientists can start to piece together an explanation for why a special population of killer whales in North America is at risk of extinction.

Discover what it takes to get a dog on the high seas to find you whale dung - other than seasickness tablets and no fear of curious 70 tonne marine mammals?

BBC One Planet: The Dog and the Whale - on air and online from Thursday 16 December

---