BUSTER the beagle will not be spending his whole Agfest cuddling up to patrons and posing for pictures, he will be putting his sniffer dog skills to the test before he officially begins his three-month training program.
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The nine-month-old beagle is a minor celebrity, after being found with eight of his siblings in a box at Seven Mile Beach. Only two of the litter survived. A competition to name the abandoned beagle was held and in December Buster was chosen by Primary Industries Minister Jeremy Rockliff.
Buster has just begun his three-month biosecurity training program and when he’s done will be based at the Hobart airport with his handler Rhonda Hall.
Ms Hall said Buster was “born to be a detector dog.”
“He has just the right temperament...he has such good search and intent,” she said.
Ms Hall said bringing Buster to Agfest was about letting him interact with the community but also to hone his dog detector skills.
“There’s a lot of things going on here, it gets them used to people and cameras and noises, so when we train them they are able to block a lot of those things out and focus on what they’re doing,” Ms Hall said.
She said beagles had always been good as detector dogs because they had great noses for it but also because of their temperament.
Buster will spend three months training, starting first on detecting fruit and vegetable matter and then progressing to more complex things.
A new group of detector dogs have started in the state and Ms Hall said they were already proving their worth.
“They are detecting kilograms of stuff, you just wouldn’t be able to detect it any other way,” she said.
She said one of the dogs detected plant material from a man’s wedding corsage that had been packed away in his luggage. The corsage was made of myrtle rust material.
“It’s things like that you don’t think of that the dogs can detect,” she said.