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Making Sure We’re Sleeping Tight: Sniffing
out the Bed Bugs with Roo and Maverick
By
Jane Singelton
When Stewart Philpott was growing up in Columbus, Ohio, he longed to have a
dog. “But as the child, you can’t make the decisions. At the end of the day,
it’s up to Mom and Dad. And of course we lived in the city, too, which makes
having a dog difficult.”
By the sixth grade Stew and his family moved to Ottawa, Ontario, Canada’s
capital city, where his parents had accepted positions in the workforce. Stew
attended middle school and high school there and worked in the hotel/hospitality
industry during his high school and university years.
When an opportunity to spend a summer working in Banff National Park came
Stew’s way, he jumped at the chance. Banff, Stew says, is the ‘Yellowstone’ of
Canada. Although he intended to stay for only one summer, Stew ended up staying
at Banff for twelve years. During those years, Stew worked in the
hotel/hospitality field and as a tour guide and a fish guide.
While at Banff, Stew met and fell in love with Jill Mader, who would later
become his wife. In 1990, Jill gave Stew a very loving gift for Valentine’s Day.
“I had been hesitating,” Stew said, “trying to decide if the first puppy of my
life would be a yellow Lab or a black Lab. And lo and behold, one afternoon Jill
brought home a little pudgy black Lab puppy. I named her Freedom.” Freedom
became Stew’s companion, fishing partner, and his duck dog. “When she was six
months old, I took Freedom duck hunting for the first time. She took to it
naturally, so we developed our bond quite early.”
Stew knew he wanted a career in the outdoors. His interests were in the
outdoors—hiking, fishing, hunting. So Stew registered at Selkirk College, earned
a certificate in Renewable Resources, and subsequently got a job with the
British Columbia Forest Service in McBride, B.C. So Stew, Jill, and Freedom
moved to McBride.
For the next fifteen years as the Philpott family grew, Freedom was their
devoted Lab. When Freedom died, Stew, Jill, and their daughters, Sydney and
Madiline, grieved. “It broke our hearts. We went through a year of mourning when
we just could not bring ourselves to get another dog.”
But Stew knew that when the time was right, he would get another Lab. He and
Jill now owned and operated a lodge in McBride on 112 acres of land with a river
running by it. It was a natural place for a Lab. “I was searching the Internet
and came across the Florida K9 Academy founded and run by Bill Whitstine, a
well-respected canine trainer,” Stew said. “I had already decided that this
time, I wanted a working Lab—I knew that handling a Lab as a hobby or a
second-job type of thing would be ideal for me. So I called Bill and discovered
he not only trains dogs to detect mold, he also trains dogs to detect termites
and bed bugs.”
Since Stew and Jill were running their own Beaver Creek Lodge and were
contracting their custodial services to other hotels in the area, a dog with bed
bug detection skills seemed ideal. At that time and still today, news sources
are full of reports of the resurgence of bed bugs, especially in the hotel
industry. “New York has issues, Hawaii, LasVegas—I don’t believe there’s a North
American city that hasn’t had bed bug issues in the last couple of years. And in
southwestern British Columbia, reported cases of bed bugs in urban areas
increased substantially from 2003 to 2005.
Years ago, bed bugs were kind of an old wives’ tale with the off-to-bed
admonishment of “Sleep tight. Don’t let the bed bugs bite.” But now, Stew said,
he receives Google Alerts about bed bug infestations in apartments, hotels,
universities, shelters, even on cruise ships.
Private homes also develop problems when a family member travels, bed bugs
get into the luggage, and the traveler inadvertently carries them into his home.
Pest control professionals indicate that international travel, more frequent
travel, and less effective pesticides have allowed the bed bug’s resurgence.
So the time was right for launching a bed bug detection business.
Two-year-old Roo, a fun-loving chocolate Lab, became Stew’s first bed bug
detection dog. Initial training for the team of Stew and Roo was by Bill
Whitstine at the Florida K9 Academy. Stew brought the whole family to Florida.
While they vacationed Stew attended the academy. Then the family traveled home
to Canada together with Roo.
After a couple of months, Stew was getting enough calls from the hotel
industry that he decided to add another detection dog to the team. “When I was
at the Academy, my wife and I met Maverick, a black Lab, retired bomb detection
dog that reminded me so much of Freedom that we bonded. When I got home, I
convinced Jill that we should purchase him as well. So we decided to call Bill
and purchase Maverick.” Bill and his Academy staff retrained Maverick for bed
bug detection, then shipped him to Stew’s home in Canada.
Both Roo and Maverick were rescue dogs. “Bill makes a habit of locating
unwanted dogs in Florida shelters, working with the shelter dogs, and turning
them into excellent working dogs that can detect bed bugs, termites, or mold.
He’s quite innovative.”
Labradors are so suited to this type of work, Stew said. “They are food
hounds, they love to please their master, and they are not intimidating to
people they meet.” Maverick is very methodical, Stew said. Because of his
previous work as a bomb detection dog, he is very precise. He won’t alert until
he is absolutely sure. Rooster, as Stew sometimes calls Roo, will walk into a
room and his sphere of scent is a little larger. He will alert to a nightstand,
for instance, and I know we have to do a closer search to pinpoint the nest. But
Maverick would have made the drawer his first alert. “They have different
personalities. Roo is faster, but Maverick has pinpoint accuracy.”
“I wish I could take credit for training these dogs, but I can’t. The Florida
K9 Academy gets all the credit. They perform well for me with the handling
skills I learned from Bill Whitstine and the Academy. But I give the Academy all
the credit for training Roo and Maverick in their scent detection skills.”
Stew didn’t raise these dogs as puppies. They were almost two and six years
old before they came to live with Stew and his family and they didn’t have a
master—that’s probably why they ended up in the pound, Stew said. “So it was a
bit of a struggle at first. I had to teach them that I, not they, was Alpha Dog
and I was master. It took each dog about a month to assimilate that.”
“I recommend to everyone, whether you have a Lab or another breed, spend that
one hour a day with your dog. That’s all it takes. Go for a walk, a run, a bike
ride—really make a commitment to spend at least one hour a day with your dog.
You’ll find that they will listen to you and they will come when you ask them
to. They’ll be more obedient in general. And it only takes one hour a day. The
rewards are tremendous.”
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