19 February 2018, 6:09 AM | AFP | @SABCNewsOnline
Five-month-old bloodhound Shakaria gambols through the long savannah grasses of Kenya’s Maasai Mara reserve, her playful mood swiftly turning to keen determination as she is ordered to track a human scent.
Straining at the leash, she pulls her handler along an invisible scent path laid down for her until she finds a ranger hiding in the grass, pretending to be one of the poachers she is training to sniff out.
Shakaria is top of her class of five puppies being trained by American experts to join a tracker dog unit, which has become pivotal in the fight against poaching in the Mara Triangle, part of the vast Maasai Mara ecosystem in southern Kenya that merges into Tanzania’s Serengeti.
Rangers used to struggle to chase or spot poachers across the flat, seemingly endless grasslands, so the Mara Triangle first introduced two tracker dogs in 2009.
The unit is now comprised of four tracker dogs and two more trained specifically to sniff out ivory and guns at the entrances to the park.
“They use their noses to see, not like us who use the eyes,” said Langas.
“So sometimes you are not able to see the footprint of the poachers… but when you suspect the poacher might have passed here you allow the dog to follow the scent… and you are able to retrieve that poacher at the end of the day.”
While the dog unit has greatly reduced daytime poaching, other technology such as the use of a thermal imaging camera, has helped track poachers at night.
Meanwhile, the use of community scouts and “private spies” has strangled local poaching gangs on the Kenyan side of the border, and Langas says the majority of poaching now occurs on the almost invisible border between Kenya and Tanzania.
A joint agreement between Kenya and Tanzania allows the rangers and their dogs to patrol deep into the Serengeti, with any poachers handed over to Tanzanian authorities.
“We are the first line of defence from Tanzania. We prevent poachers coming into the Mara and the Kenyan side,” said Asuka Takita, a Swahili-speaking Japanese vet, who helped start the canine unit.
“There is still a lot of work to do but we have caught over 4,000 poachers in the past 18 years,” she said.
