Saltillo’s water utility company (AGSAL) has a unique, four-legged way of dealing with the leaks threatening its 3,000 kilometers of pipeline.

While AGSAL’s system has 190 sensors monitoring the flow of water supplying roughly 1 million residents, the hero of this story is a Brittany Spaniel named Manchas (spots). The young, orange-and-white pup has been trained to detect water leaks, helping AGSAL more efficiently repair faulty pipes. 

AGSAL says that Manchas’s work prevents the loss of up to 14 liters of water per second (enough volume to supply more than 3,000 families) that would previously have been wasted while the company searched for the exact location of the leak.

Manchas works with his partner, Mariana, and their method of operation is quite fascinating. AGSAL’s sensors detect a leak in one of its pipes and satellite imagery narrows the area to a 400-meter section of the pipe. 

Enter Manchas, who walks the line until he detects the exact spot of the leak, whereupon the dog lies down and AGSAL knows exactly where to start digging to repair the leak. Repairs are carried out, in most cases, within no more than 24 hours.

With a 96% success rate thus far, Manchas helped AGSAL repair 230 leaky pipes during his first five months on the job.

Using dogs to address water leaks has proven to be highly effective in countries such as Spain, France, Sweden, Chile and Great Britain.

On Monday, AGSAL invited the public to “meet” the leak-detecting dog, while also sharing some details about Manchas in a social media post, including the following:

Age: Manchas is 1½ years old 

Breed: Brittany (or Breton) Spaniel 

Favorite Person: His AGSAL partner, Mariana

Special Skill: He can detect leaks more than 2 meters beneath the earth, in different types of terrain!

His Mission: Find hidden water leaks to prevent waste

Why Saltillo turned to a dog’s nose for water conservation

The Brittany Spaniel is a French breed of gun dog that has been bred primarily for bird hunting. This breed possesses an excellent, highly developed sense of smell, stemming from their original purpose as bird-hunting dogs. It is said that they have 300 million olfactory cells.

Manchas’s heightened sense of smell allows him to detect as little as four drops of chlorine in an Olympic-size swimming pool.

“There are only 25 leak-detecting dogs in the whole world and Manchas is one of them,” AGSAL spokeswoman Marcelo Carmona said in March, shortly after he had begun his mission with AGSAL.

The National Water Commission (Conagua) recently officially recognized Manchas as Mexico’s “Guardian of Water.”

AGSAL says it is considering training a second dog so as to give Manchas adequate downtime and increase the efficiency of its fascinating leak-detecting model.

With reports from Excelsior, Infobae and Radio Fórmula