Fire ants are an extremely invasive and dangerous ant species that cause considerable economic and ecological impact to any country they invade. In the year 2000 they were found in Qld and both the Qld and federal government and all states joined in to start a national red imported fire ant eradication program, which initially received approximately 380 million dollars for the firs 12 to 15 years of operation.

 

Recently this eradication program received another 400 million for the next 10 years operation. Fire ants are known as tramp ants which signifies they are mostly spread by human movement pathways and are extremely adaptable and can out compete our native ants easily.

 

These ants can kill humans and animals and greatly reduce the use of infested land, they are extremely tough to eradicate. To date Craig has trained both the first dogs in the world to be successful and the largest team of fire ant detection dogs. Craig and Tracey have been involved in this since year 2000 and all our dogs work under animal ethics and are independently assessed and validated.

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Naturally Craig and Tracey have had to constantly compete with other trainers whom would like to try to get the contracts. Craig and Tracey developed the training program from the ground up and own the intellectual property. Building training programs that have interface with scientific services and to be constantly monitored for rate of effort, which means how much area is being covered and at what success rates. This has had to be quality assured and assessed for years and dogs have to be independently validated really does make you very accountable.

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Craig has been contracted to the state and federal programs for over 21 years now and have learnt so much about myself and how governments operate. During this time he has trained well over 20 detection dogs for several programs that we hold contracts for.