Dog called Bear leads fight to save koalas from Australian bushfires

A team of Australian scientists who use a sniffer dog to rescue koalas in trouble said on Monday (September 14) it has started preparing for a summer of dangerous bushfires, with hopes of avoiding a repeat of the previous summer’s high death count of the native animals. Led by Bear, a border collie and Australian cattle dog cross, University of Sunshine Coast’s (USC) Detection Dogs for Conservation says it saved more than 100 koalas in the country’s worst summer of forest fires in decades from late 2019 to early 2020. Some 6,000 koalas were killed and thousands of hectares of their habitat destroyed. Almost exactly a year since the first fires of that season began, Bear is back, the group said, with a focus on the northern state of Queensland which did not experience the same destruction as other states last year but has been labelled a risk in the summer ahead. Fires razed more than 11 million hectares (37 million acres) of bushland across Australia’s southeast from September 2019 to February 2020, killin