Border Collies Enlisted To Clean Beaches

Transcript

STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:

And now, in our continuing effort to keep you in touch with all the world, we now have an update on seagulls.

RENEE MONTAGNE, HOST:

Specifically, their poop. It can hurt water quality, even force beach closings. Dusty Jordan is a Central Michigan University graduate student who studied this subject.

DUSTY JORDAN: What we're doing is we're trying to keep them off the beach, and to do that, we're using border collies - trained border collies to chase them.

INSKEEP: That was the experiment: See if dogs can dispose of seagulls, get them to go somewhere else. After two years of frolicking on the beaches, the results were presented this week at the annual meeting of the American Society for Microbiology. The beaches with collies had significantly lower levels of bacteria from seagull poop than those without. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.