Speed Skating Inspired Dog Names

Tucker Fredricks started skating in 1994 when he was just ten years old and has gone on to win the 500m World Cup gold medal eleven times, as well as racing in the 2006, 2010, and 2014 Winter Olympic games. Tucker the conservation dog, once a six-month-old stray found roaming the streets of Seattle, was a speed sniffer rather than a speed skater and was as outstanding in his field as Tucker Fredricks was in speed skating. The Labrador Retriever was adopted by Conservation Canines as a one year old dog in 2006, an organization based out of the University of Washington that trains dogs like Tucker, dogs with an insatiable desire to chase a tennis ball, to search out the feces of certain types of wildlife in order to get information about their habits and health. He is known as a scat detection dog, one that searches down the excrement of other animals including arboreal iguanas, moose, wolverine, and most notably, the excrement of the Orca, sometimes referred to as the killer whale. 

Tucker is particularly well suited for the task because, unlike most Labrador Retrievers, Tucker is not at all fond of the water. He doesn’t mind riding in the boat, but his reluctance to jump in the water after his quarry prevents him from contaminating the samples and they are scooped up by researchers without him ever coming into contact with it. Examining whale scat can tell researchers not only the gender and species of the animal that expelled it, but it can also expose toxins lurking in their diet, provide hormone levels for researchers to assess, and uncover what these ocean giants have been eating recently. Tucker had to be fast when hunting whale poop, however, as the movement and composition of the water in the ocean causes the whale scat to break apart and sink within just thirty minutes to an hour. While physical biopsies of whales that were done prior to the formation of Conservation Canines resulted in less than a dozen samples of scat per year, researchers are garnering around a hundred and fifty samples per year with the help of their dogs, a treasure trove of information. Tucker was not the first seeker of whale scat, that honor goes to an Australian Cattle Dog by the name of Gator, and now that he has retired to the San Juan Island, where he lives with his handler Liz, an Australian Cattle dog named Dio has taken over the search.