With the Bedbug Apocalypse upon us, inspectors from the NYC housing authority want to buy bedbug-sniffing dogs, according to the Daily News: "It's something we've been looking at as we've seen the violations increase." Too bad they don't really work!

Earlier this month The New York Times reported on the popularity of Roscoe the cute bedbug-sniffing dog, and also the hint that these dogs aren't really doing anything:

Many pest control companies have the same frustration," said Michael F. Potter, an entomology professor at the University of Kentucky, "that they often follow behind dogs that are indicating bedbugs, and they can't find anything."

Okay, so one person's opinion is just that — their opinion. Oh, but then there's this woman's costly story:

Jessica Silver and her husband paid $3,500 in extermination fees after a dog indicated there were bedbugs throughout their row house in Windsor Terrace, Brooklyn. They got rid of 40 garbage bags full of clothes and baby toys that they feared were infested and their Pottery Barn queen-size bed. But Mrs. Silver continued to get bitten, and she called another exterminator, John Furman of Boot-a-Pest, based on Long Island, who spent two hours combing through her bedroom, where the biting was taking place, only to find no traces of bedbugs, alive or dead.

The culprits, she eventually discovered, were rodent mites.

Maybe the cute, expensive little dogs will work, and the bedbugs will stop "violating" everyone. Or maybe they won't. Anything to satisfy a panicked public, right?

[Image via AP]