In a hotel room near Glasgow, a spaniel called Benji bounds to the right-hand side of the single bed. He is hunting bedbugs. Within six seconds, he has found them.

While dogs can be heroes in so many ways — finding drugs, sniffing out diseases, guiding blind people, finding bodies trapped in earthquakes — locating bedbugs is also on the list of remarkable jobs that they can do.

Benji, 4, is a sprocker, a mix of cocker and springer spaniel. He is one of a little-known army of dogs helping to tackle the rise in bedbugs. The ones he found were encased in a sealed tube and hidden in the mattress as part of his weekly training.

After sniffing them out, he sits down and