Maya the koala rescue dog

Growing up, Romane was something of a frustrated dog lover. She loved wildlife, too. Or rather, her scientist’s brain was fascinated by native animals, their habits and habitat.

After initially training as a vet in her native France, Romane shifted gears and became an ecologist, studying the relationships between organisms and their environments. She moved to Australia in 2007 to complete PhD research into koalas in human-made habitats.

‘I started thinking that maybe there was another animal that could find these scats by relying on their nose.’

The tricky thing about studying koalas is that they are hard to find: they camouflage remarkably well against the grey-green leaves of their preferred eucalyptus trees. And their voracious appetites mean they move around a lot; adult koalas eat up to a kilogram of leaves every day, so they regularly change trees.

Consequently, the easiest way for ecologists to identify koala habitats is not by looking for actual koalas but for koala scat, which is the scientific term for poo.

Unfortunately, locating small, round, brown koala droppings on the ground among a lot of thick, equally brown leaf litter is pretty difficult, too. As Romane carried out the laborious task day after day, she got to thinking there had to be a better way.

‘I started thinking that maybe there was another animal that could find these scats by relying on their nose.

‘Koala poo is very smelly, but it doesn’t smell like poo – it smells like eucalyptus. Using your eyes, they are quite hard to spot, but for dogs the smell would be like a rose in the bush.’

Dogs weren’t in common use for conservation work at this stage. In fact, Romane didn’t even know conservation dogs existed in Australia – she describes her feeling that canines might be well suited to the job as ‘just a hunch’.

She contacted several professional dog trainers to discuss her idea. It’s something of an understatement to say none was particularly enthused.

Discouraged by the response, she set the idea aside while she completed her PhD.

In 2012, through a mutual acquaintance, Romane happened to meet a dog trainer by the name of Gary ‘Gaz’ Jackson. She mentioned to him that she had once hoped to train a dog to detect koala scat, but the plan had been scuppered by dubious members of his own profession.

‘He looked at me and said, “But that’s so easy!”’ she recalls. After a robust discussion, Gaz agreed to help Romane locate a suitable dog and train it to find koala scat. A few weeks later, he called to say he’d found her. ‘He said, “I have your dog.”

He had found her at a local shelter – Romane believes her former owners simply abandoned her outside, leaving no name and no history. She decided to call her Mayamaya, which she had discovered means ‘dog’ in the Pitta Pitta language once spoken in what is now western Queensland; she would be Maya for short.

‘My understanding is that she was supposed to be put down on the day Gaz rescued her, but the vet nurse at the clinic didn’t want to put her down,’ she says.

The nurse’s reluctance may have had something to do with the fact that Maya was only a young dog; she estimated her age to be somewhere between one and four.

But despite her youth, Maya wasn’t in great shape. ‘She was a very smelly ball of fluff, and she was really scared,’ says Romane.

One thing Maya did want to do, however, was play ball. A large part of the reason Gaz had chosen her was that she was ball obsessed. That drive to play is vitally important for a detection dog – or any sort of working dog, really – because the promise of play is their motivation to work, with a few minutes of playtime their reward for a job well done.

Romane had been told that Maya was a mix of working breeds. It was only years later that she discovered that was not the case at all. ‘We were at an RSPCA occasion and some people came up to us that had a dog that was the spitting image of Maya. The same colouring, the same spots – she’s got very spotty feet. They said, “You’ve got a lovely blue merle border collie,”’ she says. Though she knew Maya was incredible, purebred or not, the comment was something of a revelation for Romane, because by then she was more than familiar with Maya’s incredible work ethic.

With her colleague Dr Celine Frere, in 2015 Romane co-founded the not-for-profit USC Detection Dogs for Conservation (DDC) team. Russell Miller became the team’s dog trainer. Maya, of course, was the team’s founding dog.

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Today, Maya is a senior dog. While the younger team members tackle these new branches of conservation detection, Maya, the doyenne of the group, continues to sniff out scats and provide researchers with valuable tools to help Australia’s emblematic marsupial.

For Romane, dogs in general – and Maya in particular – provide an ideal example of how to age gracefully. ‘I don’t think they care how old they are, and I don’t think we should care either,’ she says. ‘I never see Maya as an old dog. I see her as a friend, an amazing colleague, and a wonderfully happy personality.’

We should all take a (eucalyptus) leaf out of Maya’s book.

Edited extract from Extraordinary Old Dogs by Laura Greaves, published by Penguin Random House, RRP $34.99.

What’s that, you want more senior dogs? Scroll through for a peek at the other furry friends featured alongside Maya in Extraordinary Old Dogs: