A little dog in Moncton is helping people sleep tight by using his nose to sniff out biting bedbugs.

Ekko, a two-year-old white Parson Russell terrier — essentially the same as a Jack Russell terrier, originally bred for hunting foxes — is good at his trade, able to easily find the bothersome pests in small vials concealed around the house by his owner and trainer, Andrew Farago.

"Ekko smells bedbugs. Everything has an odour, and if it has an odour you can teach the dog to find it," Farago said.

It takes only seconds for Ekko to ferret out bedbugs, which feed on the blood of humans and other warm-blooded hosts.

"They can be as thin as three or four sheets of paper, and they can fit in anywhere. They'll hide in places like between the picture frame and the picture itself. They'll hide in a crevice that small," Farago said.

"And it's almost impossible to find them. So, that's what Ekko does — he can sniff them out behind a wall. It looks easy here, but to get to this point has been probably 50 to 60 hours [of training.]"

In total, the dog received more than 800 hours worth of training as he honed his special sniffing skills.

After successfully tracking down bedbugs, Ekko is rewarded with a piece of hotdog.

Hotel room service

Farago's reward is getting hotels to hire him to make sure their rooms are clean. A few weeks ago, he was in Nova Scotia checking out a room that had just been sprayed for the pests.

"But on the same floor as the original problem, two doors over, we found bedbugs on the nightstand," said Farago, who operates Scentdogs, a canine detection service.

There will be increasing demand for service dogs like Ekko, Farago said, because bedbugs are travellers — they move from city to city hiding in clothes and luggage.

Farago keeps his training bedbugs alive by letting them suck some blood out of his arm every couple of weeks. He said he's grown accustomed to that part of his job.

Ekko is also trained to detect mould and carpenter ants.