Amy Bradley-Hole Travel columnist • Profile • E-mail

Friday was graduation day at an elite academy, and I was privileged to meet a few members of the senior class. They were an impressive group. The students had to pass rigorous tests before they were allowed to leave the campus. Their guardians had to pass some tests, too. Though the graduates are a smart and hardworking bunch, they also seemed pretty fun-loving. Plus, they liked to give lots of kisses — big, wet, sloppy ones, in fact.

This was a graduating class of canines, and they were ready to complete their education at J & K Canine Academy, in High Springs, Fla. These dogs are about to enter the workplace, and their job will be to detect bed bugs, termites and other creepy critters.

The owner of J & K is Pepe Peruyero, a former law enforcement officer who worked with K-9 units in Gainesville, Fla. Pepe knew that dogs could be trained to sniff out narcotics, bombs and missing persons. Why not bugs, he wondered? Seeing a business opportunity, he set to work training dogs to detect the presence of termites.

The field results were great, but Peruyero worried that people would be skeptical, so he began working with the University of Florida's Department of Entomology to conduct more rigorous scientific testing. That work not only confirmed Peruyero's results with termites, but also led to the dogs learning to detect more types of bugs. In a later stage of the work, Peruyero and the university entomologists developed training and testing standards for the puppy pupils.

Peruyero chose well when he next decided to train his dogs to detect bed bugs. Bed bugs are tiny insects that look a bit like an apple seed; they live in temperate climates and feed on human blood. Although bed bugs don't spread disease and are fairly harmless, their creep-you-out factor is off the charts. Because bed bugs can be hard to spot, multiply rapidly and are hard to kill with modern pesticides, they have become a growing problem for buildings with a high occupant turnover rate. Peruyero knew that hotels, with their emphasis on cleanliness and comfort for guests, would soon be searching for new ways to combat bed bugs, so he took the plunge.

Sure enough, business is now growing rapidly. The company trained just one dog in bed-bug detection last year, but has trained another 15 dogs already this year, and has a waiting list of another dozen or so. J & K is currently one of only six facilities in the world that train dogs for insect detection. When asked if he could help clients overseas, Peruyero replied, "Absolutely! We have a trilingual staff capable of providing services worldwide."

Dogs in the bedroom
The training program that Peruyero began developing three years ago is now so advanced that his dogs can enter a hotel room and, within two to three minutes, alert their handlers if the tiniest trace of bed bugs is present in the room. The dogs can even tell the differences among live bed bugs, dead bed bugs, bed-bug eggs and even bed-bug fecal matter (yuck). The service these dogs perform is invaluable for hotels, hospitals, colleges and universities, apartment complexes, military barracks, camps — in fact, for any property owners who fear that bed bugs may be a problem. The dogs can quickly deliver the bad news, so treatment can be started immediately. Or they can give the property a clean bill of health, avoiding the cost and harsh chemicals that are used on preventive pest-control measures.

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The dogs trained by J & K are often sold to people who are interested in starting their own detection company. But J & K doesn't just train the dogs and then hand them over. The new handlers must be trained, also. The training takes five days, and the handler/dog teams must prove themselves in simulated hotel room settings, detecting the presence or absence of bed bugs with 100 percent accuracy before J & K will release them.

I met Ron and Eric Silverson, from the Tampa Bay, Fla., area, on graduation day. These guys and their new dog, the aptly named "Hunter," had passed with flying colors. Hunter will be moving to Florida's Gulf Coast to become the most-valued employee of Hunter Detection Services (H.D.S.).

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