Bovine Respiratory Disease (BRD) is difficult to diagnose and is a leading cause of poor welfare in beef cattle. As a prey species, cattle are able to mask behavioural indicators of disease. Additionally, BRD involves a combination of multiple viral and bacterial pathogens that exist commensally, yet become virulent under stressful conditions, making diagnostic testing difficult. The current industry standard method of identifying cattle with BRD is the Clinical Illness Scoring (CIS) system, which uses the presence or absence of specific illness signs. However, CIS may be unreliable, suggesting that many cattle with BRD are neither diagnosed nor receive necessary health treatments.     

Canine olfaction is a promising approach for screening for BRD. Studies using dogs to detect a variety of diseases, including bacterial and viral infections, have reported high sensitivity and specificity, suggesting that canine olfaction is a promising non-invasive disease screening technology. Dogs have been documented to detect bovine viral diarrhoea virus, which is involved in  BRD, in cell culture samples Prior to conducting trials with live cattle, validating that dogs can distinguish the scents produced by BRD-infected and healthy cattle in a controlled environment is necessary.

The overall aim of the project is to develop a methodology for accurately detecting BRD in cattle using canine olfaction. To accomplish this, we have three objectives. 

·       Objective 1: Conduct a comprehensive evaluation of the current state of the literature published on the use of canine olfaction for disease detection.

·       Objective 2: Develop training skills for teaching dogs to detect disease via olfaction.

·       Objective 3: Establish a proof of concept that dogs can be used as a potentially rapid, mobile, and accurate screening method for BRD by demonstrating that BRD can be reliably detected by dogs in a laboratory environment.

Publication: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.applanim.2022.105664