Habituated wolves at Yellowstone get GPS collars

Don't Feed The Wolves!

Ralph Maugham reports on the Hayden Valley Pack, which has been fed by visitors and is becoming habituated to human contact. Both alphas now have GPS collars which will allow monitoring of their proximity to visitors areas so that adverse conditioning can be administered.

If the feeding continues and/or the adverse conditioning fails, the future of this pack could be bleak. The Hayden Valley wolves are easily seen by visitors, so "controlling" them would be a serious loss to both the wolf recovery effort and to visitors' opportunities to see and photograph wolves in Yellowstone.

Remember that the saying "A fed bear is a dead bear" applies to wolves too. Don't feed the wolves!

More info at Ralph Maugham's wonderful site:

Ralph Maugham's Yellowstone Wolf Report

Federal hunt kills 200 coyotes in past 3 weeks

Arizona ranchers complained animals were eating calves

ELGIN, Arizona (AP) -- Federal authorities have killed 200 coyotes in southeast Arizona in the past three weeks after ranchers complained that they were eating calves.

The hunt, which ended Friday, was conducted from aircraft as part of a program run by the U.S. Department of Agriculture. The shootings took place on private and public land used by 10 to 15 ranchers, the Arizona Daily Star reported Sunday.

No documentation was available last week on how many calves had been killed, but the government said it has confirmed losses.

Rancher Rex Dalton said every lost calf costs him $500 to $650 -- the amount it could have fetched if it lived to maturity.

"I have seen coyotes attack my calves three times," Dalton said. "I've also seen others with their tails or noses chewed off."

Environmentalists were upset that the government gave no public notice. They call the program inhumane and ineffective.

The 200 animals represent 1 percent or less of the area's coyote population, and new ones will arrive within months, Arizona Game and Fish officials said.

Teresa Howes, a USDA spokeswoman, said the agency doesn't issue news releases on the activity "because we do work for private owners."

Ranchers pay $200 an hour for the aircraft rental and staff time, she said.

Aerial gunning is the cheapest and most efficient way to kill and remove coyotes, allowing agents to ensure they don't hit other wildlife, Howes said.

Copyright 2006 The Associated Press.

http://www.cnn.com/2006/US/01/29/coyotes.ap/index.html

Yellowstone mystery- 75 wolves missing?

From Ralph Maugham's fantastic wildlife web site:

"Wolf watching has grown quite a bit more challenging lately, with only about 118 wolves in Yellowstone National Park now, compared with 171 a year ago. If my calculations are right, and you subtract the 22 pups born this year from 118, that means that only 96 of those 171 are still present, which means that 75 wolves are missing. This staggering loss is appalling! It really makes me wonder--what happened to them all? "

Full wolf report at Ralph's web site:

Ralph Maugham's Wildlife Reports

Alaska revives aerial wolf shooting program

ANCHORAGE, Alaska (AP) -- The state of Alaska reinstated a population control program Thursday that allows shooting wolves from the air -- more than a week after a judge ruled it was illegal.

The program was reinstated after the Board of Game filed new regulations passed in response to Superior Court judge Sharon Gleason's concerns.

"They are effective immediately," said Annette Kreitzer, chief of staff to Lt. Gov. Loren Leman.

Gleason ruled last week that the board violated its own standards for expanding the program, in part because it did not provide justification for it or explain why alternatives such as sterilization or habitat destruction would not work.

The program, intended to boost moose and caribou populations in five areas of the state, got its start in 2003 in an area of Alaska's interior where residents had long complained predators were killing too many moose, leaving too few for food.

In an emergency meeting Wednesday, the board scrapped its existing regulations and created new ones that list alternatives it considers unfeasible, primarily because they are expensive. The board will seek to make the new rules permanent at a regular public meeting in March.

Animal rights groups fighting to shut down the program may return to court to argue that the process of rewriting the rules was illegal.

"We do not regard it as an emergency when an agency needs to adopt regulations to fix a problem of its own making," said Jim Reeves, the lawyer representing Darien, Connecticut-based Friends of Animals and seven Alaska plaintiffs.

About 400 wolves have been killed so far under the program, which permits pilot and gunner teams to shoot the wolves from the air. The state intends to kill another 400 wolves this year.

Alaska is home to the largest remaining population of gray wolves in the country. State biologists estimate about 7,000 to 11,000 wolves roam the state.

Copyright 2006 The Associated Press.

http://www.cnn.com/2006/US/01/27/wolf.control.ap/index.html

Wisconsin Gray Wolf Population- 2005 Report

By Adrian P. Wydeven and Jane E. Wiedenhoeft

The Wisconsin wolf population in late winter 2005 was 425 to 455 wolves in 108 packs and included 14 loners. A total of 414+ wolves occurred outside Indian reservations, thus the population exceeded its management goal of 350 wolves outside of Indian reservations by 64+ wolves. The wolf population had increased by 14% from the 2004 population of 373 wolves in the state. Wolf packs occurred in at least 31 counties and wolves were reported in 46 counties.

Full report on all wildlife surveys at the Wisconsin DNR web site:

Wisconsin DNR Wildlife Surveys

National Park Backlog as much as $9 Billion

From the National Parks Traveler:

How Big Is The Park Service Backlog?

At the National Park Service, the number that for me spawns the most fascination is tied to the agency's maintenance backlog. Built partly of late on an estimated $600 million annual shortfall between what the agency needs and what it spends, it's quite an incredible number, ranging somewhere between $4.5 billion and $9 billion.
That's right. There's a $4.5 billion black hole of uncertainty right smack in the middle reflecting the unknown of just how financially bad off the agency is.

To get a better understanding of this deficit, I called Bruce Sheaffer, the comptroller of the National Park Service for better than three decades. And what he told me was very interesting.

Read the full account at National Parks Traveler

National Parks Traveler

Yellowstone wolves get $1.4 million pledge

Donation helps wolf research

By MIKE STARK
Of The Gazette Staff
Wolf research in Yellowstone National Park will get a $1.4 million boost in the coming years.

An anonymous donor in Colorado has pledged to give $140,000 a year for the next 10 years to track and better understand the park's wolves, the Yellowstone Park Foundation announced Monday.

The National Park Service's Yellowstone Wolf Project will get about $100,000 a year and wolf researchers from the University of Minnesota will get the remaining $40,000.

The Yellowstone Park Foundation, a nonprofit group based in Bozeman, has typically provided about $150,000 in private donations for the Yellowstone Wolf Project each year to add to funding from the Park Service.

In recent years, private donations have made up a majority of the funding for the project, which provides short-term and long-term research on Yellowstone's wolves and how they're affecting and being affected by other animals and the landscape.

The money will go toward radio tracking equipment, flight time, data analysis and other research costs. Specific projects will include looking at how wolves interact with scavengers and other predators and generating genetic profiles to determine patterns in how wolves reproduce and move in and out of Yellowstone.

Wolves were reintroduced in the park 10 years ago. Today, there are an estimated 118 wolves in the park.

Foundation officials said the success of the wolf program brings new challenges for land managers and biologists.

"Research and monitoring of the wolves in Yellowstone is needed now as much as ever, as good science informs good management," Michael Cary, director of the Yellowstone Park Foundation, said in a statement.

At the University of Minnesota, the donation will fund research for graduate students working with David Mech, a longtime wolf researcher and a senior scientist with the U.S. Geological Survey.

"The great value of these research programs is in their long-term continuity," Mech said in a statement.

Although the $1.4 million donation is the largest ever received by the Yellowstone Park Foundation for the wolf project, the group will continue to seek support for wolf research, organizers said.

About $50,000 more will still be needed each year to match what the nonprofit has typically given for wolf research.

Billings Montana Gazette

Wisconsin wolves beware- hunters too!

8-Year-Olds May Be Allowed To Hunt In Wisconsin

Current Age Limit Is 12- Bill would allow 8-year-olds to hunt

MADISON, Wis. (AP) -- Legislators who fear young people are losing interest in Wisconsin's hunting tradition want to allow children as young as 8 years old to shoot deer.

Rep. Scott Gunderson's proposal would lower the hunting age from 12 to 8.

"It's important to get kids involved in hunting at a younger age. If they are not engaged in hunting by 12 or 13, they probably won't be," said Gunderson, R-Waterford.

But the idea of a lower hunting age horrifies Joe Slattery, whose 14-year-old son was accidentally shot and killed by a 12-year-old while deer hunting in Marinette County last year.

"This is a child safety issue," Slattery said. "Eight-year-olds don't have the coordination or attention span or physical ability to handle a gun. They are learning cursive writing and some of them believe in Santa Claus."

The state Assembly already approved Gunderson's bill on a 74-19 vote. The measure still needs approval from the state Senate and Gov. Jim Doyle to become law.

A child age 12 to 15 now can hunt with a parent or guardian. Under Gunderson's bill, parents or guardians could designate an adult mentor who must stay within arm's length of the 8- to 11-year-old child, and the two must share a weapon.

"All of the concentration must be on the youth," Gunderson said.

Eight-year-olds would not need to take a hunter safety course until they turn 12, he said.

The DNR is taking a neutral stance on the bill.

"The department is in favor of increasing hunter opportunity as long as we don't do it at the risk of compromising safety," DNR Chief Warden Randy Stark said.

The number of hunters has dropped 7 percent nationwide since 1991, Stark said, and it's expected to decline even more as baby boomers quit hunting.

According to the state Department of Natural Resources, 722,803 people bought hunting licenses in 2004, down from 773,239 in 2000.

Much of the decline occurred in 2002, when chronic wasting disease was discovered in the deer herd. The numbers have climbed in 2003 and 2004.

"The other big issue is parental rights. This allows them to make a decision whether a child can hunt at an earlier age," Gunderson said.

The Wisconsin chapter of the American Academy of Pediatrics doesn't believe having 8-year-old hunters is safe, said Dr. Tim Corden, medical director of University of Wisconsin Hospital's pediatric critical care unit.

"Children obtain different skills at different ages," he said. "Their concentration and attention spans potentially pose a risk for them to be responsible and have a hunting weapon in that environment."

Gannett Wisconsin Newspapers

The Wolves of Lusatia Preview

Mijik Sanderson Films

Dog Virus May Be Killing Yellowstone Wolves

Hope Hamashige
for National Geographic News
January 17, 2006

In the 11 years since gray wolves were reintroduced into Yellowstone National Park, they haven't seen a season as devastating as this.

According to park officials, 47 of the 69 wolf pups born last year have died. And though there's no official word on what's causing the deaths, experts monitoring Yellowstone's packs believe a dog disease called parvovirus is responsible.

Dan Stahler is a biologist at the park, which straddles the borders of Montana, Idaho, and Wyoming. He said further testing is needed to confirm that parvovirus is killing the pups.

"We won't know for sure until we can trap and test the animals this winter," he said.

Park officials are cautiously optimistic that this will be a temporary setback for the wolves, he added.

"We are not alarmed, but definitely concerned," Stahler said. "Our prediction is we will rebound."

A Constant Threat

Parvovirus, also known as parvo, spread from domestic dogs to wild animals in the U.S. in the late 1970s. Since then the disease has become an everpresent part of the wildlife environment.

"It's in the environment like fleas are in the environment," said Carolyn Sime, wolf program director for the Montana Department of Fish, Wildlife and Parks. "It is just out there and they can pick it up."

The virus is carried by a number of wild animals, including coyotes, foxes, and some wolves. It is highly contagious and is usually passed through contact with the feces of infected animals.

The virus can infect the small intestine, causing severe diarrhea, dehydration, and ultimately death. Pups are particularly susceptible.

Given that parvo is a constant threat, scientists don't know why it flares up in some years and not in others.

"The challenge and concern comes from the fact that we don't understand why it is more virulent in some years and why in some years it has no effect at all," Sime said.

A minor outbreak hit Yellowstone's wolves in 1999, but there has not been a flare-up since.

Mystery Factors

Ed Bangs, wolf recovery coordinator for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, says outbreaks take place when exposure to the virus is coupled with other factors. But scientists do not know what secondary circumstances trigger the outbreaks.

"It may be something like the weather or poor food supply that makes the pups weaker," Bangs said, "but we don't know."

Sime noted that some scientists believe sheer numbers may play a role in the outbreaks.

Most of the wolves trapped by biologists in Montana test positive for exposure to parvo, she said, but few succumb.

"Outside the park the wolves don't interact with each other that much," she said.

When their numbers are higher, animals tend to pass diseases more readily, Sime added.

"For a lot of other wildlife diseases, density matters," she said.

Little to Be Done

Scientists believe parvo is the likely cause of the pup deaths in part because it attacks pups and not adult wolves.

"The reason pups die and adults don't is [pups] are weaker," Bangs said. "The pups get weaned and lose the protective elements they get from the milk, and they are suddenly susceptible to disease."

If the disease killing Yellowstone's pups turns out to be parvo, there is little that can be done for the wolves, experts say.

Dogs can be vaccinated against the virus, but it is not feasible to trap and vaccinate all the wild wolves in Yellowstone, park officials say.

Most wolf experts and wildlife biologists agree that if parvo is the cause, Yellowstone's population should ultimately rebound on its own.

Wildlife biologist David Mech studies wolves in Minnesota, where an outbreak of parvo killed many wolf pups in the 1980s.

"Ultimately what it does is retard the rate of increase of the population, but it doesn't reduce the population [in the long run]," said Mech, who is also founder of the International Wolf Center in Ely,

In the meantime, Yellowstone officials said they will closely monitor the park's wolves.

"Our hope is that we will learn more about what caused the outbreak," Yellowstone's Stahler said.

"We also hope the situation doesn't arise again in the next few years."

A Bear's Necessities

By DAVID QUAMMEN
Bozeman, Mont.
Op-Ed Contributor

The grizzly bears of Yellowstone Park are a national treasure, owned by nobody, preserved in trust for everybody, like the gold reserves of Fort Knox, the memory of Louis Armstrong and the clear air over western Nebraska on a breezy spring day. For 31 years, those bears have been listed as "threatened," and therefore protected from hunting and certain other tribulations under the Endangered Species Act. But recently the Interior Department has proposed removing them from the list, and this year, after a period for public comment that ends on Feb. 15, Interior Secretary Gale Norton will make a decision. That decision, though political, will in some degree be informed by science. The scientific question is, How safe are Yellowstone's grizzlies from extinction? The political question is, How safe do Americans want them to be?

The good news from Yellowstone comes in comparing two approximate numbers: roughly 200 bears in 1975, roughly 600 bears today. But to understand what those numbers mean, and what they don't mean, you need a few other facts.

The grizzlies of Yellowstone Park are part of a bear population in a larger area, known as the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem, which encompasses also Grand Teton National Park, parts of six national forests and some other lands under public and private ownership. That ecosystem, so far as bears are concerned, is an island. It's surrounded by landscape inhospitable to grizzly bears: farms, ranches, fences, Interstate highways, golf courses, trophy houses, malls, railroad lines and towns like the one where I live.

Grizzlies from elsewhere do not immigrate to this ecological island. The Yellowstone bears are isolated, marooned, and have been for many years. It's nice to know that, under those circumstances, because of concerted management and conservation efforts by some good, hard-working people, the population has increased threefold, from very small to smallish. But it's also important to remember that insularity itself carries heightened risk. Why? Because any smallish, isolated population is especially vulnerable to bad luck - like a failure of its food sources, an epidemic disease or a coincidence of both.

Concrete examples of such bad luck come easily to mind. The wolves of Yellowstone - to consider another controversial species, reintroduced to the park in 1995 - have been experiencing drastically high pup mortality this last year, possibly because of a lethal virus. Of 69 wolf pups born in 2005, only 22 have survived: bad luck for the Yellowstone wolves, which until recently seemed to be thriving. Meanwhile, the white bark pines of Yellowstone are dying from a combination of fungal infection and bark-burrowing beetles. That's bad luck for Yellowstone's grizzlies, for whom pine nuts are a crucial food in autumn.

Now imagine the Yellowstone grizzlies in a year when a bear-killing virus arrives, the pine nuts are gone, and the cutthroat trout (another major food source, hurt by competition with lake trout, a non-native transplant) don't spawn. The population could quickly drop back to 200. Such fluctuations are common among wild animal populations. The difference with insular populations is that because they lack any supply of immigrants, they are more likely to fluctuate all the way to zero.

And then there's genetics. As the number of bears in the Yellowstone population fell to its low point of 200 in the early 1970's, collective genetic diversity fell too. The degree of loss can only be estimated, but the estimates raise concern. The important points to understand here are that small (and smallish) populations inexorably lose genetic diversity with each passing generation, through a random process called genetic drift, and that when sheer population size rebounds, genetic diversity does not rebound with it.

Genetic impoverishment becomes worse, not better, with each generation when a small population remains small. Inbreeding adds to the consequences of such impoverishment. And we can assume that the 600 Yellowstone grizzlies are now roughly as inbred as if they'd descended from 200 cousins, second cousins and cousins once or twice removed, left to mate together on a desert island 30 years ago.

The Interior Department has recognized this genetic concern and suggested dealing with it by periodically importing a female bear from elsewhere. That might help, or it might not, but the very suggestion reminds us that Yellowstone's grizzly population is constrained, marginal, genetically depauperate and threatened (yes, "threatened" is the right word) by various combinations of possible and inevitable trouble. And I haven't even mentioned the loss of bear habitat within the ecosystem because of timber cutting and oil and gas extraction on public lands and development on private lands.

Some people have argued that it's important in principle to de-list the Yellowstone grizzly, in order to show that the Endangered Species Act can yield success stories. That's like arguing that we must claim success in our wars, early and often, in order to preserve faith in America's military. So long as Yellowstone is an island, growing smaller every year, we shouldn't delude ourselves that its grizzlies have "recovered" in any but the most tenuous and misleading numerical sense. Real recovery will come, if ever, only when we radically revise our vision of how humans and grizzly bears might share far bigger areas of North American landscape.

David Quammen is the author, most recently, of "Monster of God: The Man-Eating Predator in the Jungles of History and the Mind."

©2006 New York Times

Alaska aerial hunt of wolves declared illegal

Judge says rules weren’t followed, governor hopes to restart program

A judge declared illegal Alaska’s controversial program of shooting wolves from the air to boost the population of moose and other game, prompting state officials to suspend the policy.

Superior Court Judge Sharon Gleason said Tuesday the Alaska Board of Game failed to follow its own requirements when it launched a program allowing private hunters to gun down wolves from an aircraft to remove the animals from the food chain.

Since the program started in 2003, licensed hunters have shot and killed hundreds of wolves by tracking the animals and shooting them from above in the face of protests from animal rights groups and the occasional tourism boycott.

Gleason ruled that the state failed to adequately address regulatory requirements, calling for proof that aerial wolf control is necessary and would be more effective than other, less-drastic steps to boost game populations.

“The Board is bound by its regulations,” Gleason wrote. “A review of the enabling regulations for the aerial wolf control programs ... indicate that the Board failed to adequately address some or all of these regulatory requirements.”

Governor backs program
Alaska has halted the program pending further review of the ruling and the state’s Division of Wildlife Conservation is trying to contact licensed hunters to inform them of the suspension, said Matt Robus, the division’s director.

Gov. Frank Murkowski vowed that aerial wolf control will continue after some adjustments are made.

“I stand firmly behind the state’s predator control programs, which are based upon sound science,” the Republican governor said in a statement. “I look forward to prompt and appropriate action.”

Other states have taken action to control wolf populations. Earlier this month, Idaho signed an agreement to place management of an estimated 500 gray wolves into state, rather than federal, hands.

The agreement gives ranchers permission to eliminate wolves that harass livestock and empowers Idaho wildlife managers to cut down wolf packs that make a dent in deer and elk populations.

Goal was 400 culled this winter
Alaska’s aerial wolf cull was authorized mostly in the interior part of the state, extending to five separate areas that comprise about 6 percent of its land mass, said Robus.

Under the program, more than 400 wolves have been killed. The state had set a goal of another 400 this winter. The state issued more than 100 new permits last month.

Alaska wolves are not classified as endangered or threatened, and Alaska has 7,000 to 11,000 wolves, biologists estimate. Early indications are that the program had been working, Robus said.

State officials said they are studying the decision to determine the proper legal response to it, while critics praised the ruling.

“It reaffirms what some of us have been saying, and that is that the programs are poorly grounded,” said Vic Van Ballenberghe, a retired federal biologist.

Van Ballenberghe, a former Board of Game member during the administration of Democratic Gov. Tony Knowles, said the current administration has “cut corners” and launched wolf control programs for political rather than scientific reasons.

© 2006 MSNBC.com

URL: http://msnbc.msn.com/id/10905885/

First it's gay cowboys- now it's cats and moose!

cancer detecting dogs

N. Y. Times

January 17, 2006

Dogs Excel on Smell Test to Find Cancer
By DONALD G. McNEIL Jr.


In the small world of people who train dogs to sniff cancer, a little-known Northern California clinic has made a big claim: that it has trained five dogs - three Labradors and two Portuguese water dogs - to detect lung cancer in the breath of cancer sufferers with 99 percent accuracy.

The study was based on well-established concepts. It has been known since the 80's that tumors exude tiny amounts of alkanes and benzene derivatives not found in healthy tissue.

Other researchers have shown that dogs, whose noses can pick up odors in the low parts-per-billion range, can be trained to detect skin cancers or react differently to dried urine from healthy people and those with bladder cancer, but never with such remarkable consistency.

The near-perfection in the clinic's study, as Dr. Donald Berry, the chairman of biostatistics at M. D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, put it, "is off the charts: there are no laboratory tests as good as this, not Pap tests, not diabetes tests, nothing."

As a result, he and other cancer experts say they are skeptical, but intrigued. Michael McCulloch, research director for the Pine Street Foundation in Marin County, Calif., and the lead researcher on the study, acknowledged that the results seemed too good to be true. (For breast cancer, with a smaller number of samples, the dogs were right about 88 percent of the time with almost no false positives, which compares favorably to mammograms.)

"Yes, we were astounded, as well," Mr. McCulloch said. "And that's why it needs to be replicated with other dogs, plus chemical analysis of what's in the breath."

He is applying for National Science Foundation grants to try just that, he said. The fact that the study was carried out by a clinic supported by the Pine Street Foundation that combines traditional chemotherapy with acupuncture and herbal medicine raised suspicions, as did the fact that it is to be published by a little-known journal, Integrative Cancer Therapies. (The journal published it online last year.)

But experts who read the study could not find any obvious fatal flaw in its methodology, and the idea that dogs can detect cancer is "not crazy at all," said Dr. Ted Gansler, director of medical content in health information for the American Cancer Society. "It's biologically plausible," he said, "but there has to be a lot more study and confirmation of effectiveness."

Dr. Berry, too, was interested but suspicious. "If true, it's huge," he said. "Which is one reason to be skeptical."

Dr. Berry noted, half-jokingly, that Gregor Mendel, the 19th-century discoverer of the laws of genetics, also reported data on his crossbreeding of green and yellow peas that was too good to be true: he repeatedly came up with the perfect 3-1 ratios he predicted. "But we've forgiven Mendel and his gardener," Dr. Berry added, "because his theory turned out to be right."

In Mr. McCulloch's study, the five dogs, borrowed from owners and Guide Dogs for the Blind, were trained as if detecting bombs. They repeatedly heard a clicker and got a treat when they found a desired odor in many identical smelling spots.

The clinic collected breath samples in plastic tubes filled with polypropylene wool from 55 people just after biopsies found lung cancer and from 31 patients with breast cancer, as well as from 83 healthy volunteers.

The tubes were numbered, and then placed in plastic boxes and presented to the dogs, five at a time. If the dog smelled cancer, it was supposed to sit.

For breath from lung cancer patients, Mr. McCulloch reported, the dogs correctly sat 564 times and incorrectly 10 times. (By adjusting for other factors, the researchers determined the accuracy rate at 99 percent.)

For the breath from healthy patients, they sat 4 times and did not sit 708 times.

Experts who read the study raised various objections: The smells of chemotherapy or smoking would be clues, they said. Or the healthy breath samples could have been collected in a different room on different days. Or the dogs could pick up subtle cues - like the tiny, unintentional movements of observers picked up by Clever Hans, the 19th-century "counting horse," as he neared a correct answer. But Mr. McCulloch said cancer patients who had begun chemotherapy were excluded, smokers were included in both groups and the breath samples were collected in the same rooms on the same days. The tubes were numbered elsewhere, he said, and the only assistant who knew which samples were cancerous was out of the room while the dogs were working.

"The fact that dogs did this is kind of beside the point," he said. "What this proved is that there are detectable differences in the breath of cancer patients. Now technology has to rise to that challenge."

The next step, he said, will be to analyze breath samples with a gas chromatograph to figure out exactly which mixes of chemicals the dogs are reacting to.

Even if the dogs are accurate in repeat experiments, Dr. Gansler of the American Cancer Society said, it will be useful only as a preliminary scan. "It's not like someone would start chemotherapy based on a dog test," he said. "They'd still get a biopsy."