In January 2017, the Chilean region of La Mau was covered by the strongest forest fires, which destroyed 457,000 hectares of green spaces. Waiting for nature to recover is too long, and manually restoring forests is too troublesome. But the Chileans found a way out — three fire dogs, Das, Olivia and Leto, retrained as foresters and started sowing seeds. It’s like a game to them!
The ashes from the burned forests themselves serve as a good fertilizer, and soon spring will begin in the Southern Hemisphere with heavy precipitation, so the only question is to have time to spread as many seeds as possible over a vast area. To do this, Francisca Torres taught the trio of her Border Collie dogs a simple trick: she puts special bags with slits on the pets, puts seeds in there and sends the dogs to run and frolic around the neighborhood. The dogs are playing, the seeds are falling out, the work is being argued. The only thing you need is to leave every day with the whole team in a truck to a new site.
Border collies, according to Torres, are the best suited for this job. She taught them to ignore small animals and monitor the consumption of seeds — the more actively the dogs run and scatter the contents of the bags, the faster they will be able to return and get a delicious reward.
A person can manually scatter 3 kg of seeds in a day, while each dog is 8 kg and cover 30 km of territory. But the most important thing is that if it’s not an easy job for people, then for Das, Olivia and Summer it’s all fun and pleasure.
The most important task is to return the fauna and other animals to the burned forests, which will then spread the seeds naturally. To do this, first of all, you need to create a food base, in the form of grass, which will become food for some creatures, and those are already food for others.
Therefore, instead of saplings of trees, Torres and her dogs are now engaged in grass and shrubs, and if you look at those areas from which everything began, then the first green life is already making its way through the charred earth.
