"When Collette Yee was first assigned to work with Jack, she did not think the partnership would work.
"I felt like it was impossible to connect with him. He didn't want anything to do with me. He would just like take off running into the woods and go look for whatever fun thing he could go find to do, which wasn't necessarily running the exercise," she recalls.
Jack is a blue heeler mix and Yee is his bounder, a term for people who work with conservation detection dogs at Rogue Detection Teams in Rice, Washington. Bounders and their dogs assist biologists in locating hidden, hard-to-find and invisible samples in the wild, from plants to pangolins to poop. And Yee and Jack proved to be the quite the duo."
Berly McCoy, Emily Kwong, Rachel Carlson, and Rebecca Ramirez report for NPR March 5, 2025.
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