Poaching has continued to be a significant problem for numerous years now, but there is hope on the horizon in the form of our four legged best friends, dogs. Dogs are being trained and used in the prevention and detection of poachers in several countries around the world. Humans lack the sophisticated sense of smell that dogs are gifted with, and depending on the dog, they can smell up to 100 000 times the power of our human sense. A trained canine can detect one teaspoon of sugar dissolved in a million gallons of water. This is incredible! This keen sense of smell is what is leading conservationists to use dogs in the prevention and apprehension of deplorable poachers.
Dogs are being used to sniff out ivory and rhino horns as well as other illegal animal trade products, in airports and in the field in various parts of the world, predominantly throughout Europe and parts of Africa. While the dogs cannot single handedly stop poaching, they are making a significant impact. Their use shows an increased commitment by world governments to take poaching seriously. These dog teams are now being used by many government and private agencies because of their proven success.
Trained sniffer dogs make much better trackers than humans because they possess enhanced skills and physical abilities that humans do not. These dogs can work for hours without stopping and just like our pet dogs, they are eager to please their guardians. In addition, they can work in adverse conditions like rain, snow, and heat and also in various geographies like wetlands, mountains, forests, and dry lands. Different dogs are chosen for different areas of the world to best fit the climate and geography of the region they will be working in. For example, German Shepherds are used in Tanzania over Bloodhounds because they have more stamina and are more naturally equipped to handle heat. These special skills allow the dogs to hunt the hunters.
Some say that there is no better prevention tool than the sniffer dogs. Dogs can detect poachers coming, as well as find them after they have fled. In cases before dogs were used, if an animal was killed and the poachers were not caught on site, they often remained at large because there was no way to find them after the crime. Now, the dogs can take the scent of the poachers from something as simple as a footprint left behind. The dogs can track them up to one day past the event and lead them through the entire trail of the fleeing attackers to their ultimate stopping place, where arrests can be made. One example happened in Kenya where human patrols found the rhino trails covered in cable snares. Although they could remove the snares, they had no idea who put them there. The ground was mostly lava rock, and it was impossible for human tracking; dogs were brought in. It only took the dogs four hours to track the trail of the perpetrators to a small hut on a nearby farm where they found more snares, poisoned arrows and various other poaching weapons. The culprits were apprehended for their crimes due the diligence of the dogs. This one example saved innumerable lives among the animals living there.
Damien Bell, director of Big Life Tanzania says, "appart from their incredible tracking abilities, dogs are wonderful to work with because they don't have any political agenda and they can't be compromised. They love their handlers, and they do a job until the job is done". The introduction of these tracking dogs is deterring some poachers and saving animals. The hope is that more poachers will start thinking twice before killing because the dogs just may track them down!
