Canine detectives collar ivory smugglers at African airports
FOR years they risked life and limb to sniff out landmines in Iraq and Afghanistan alongside British Army bomb squads.
Now, an elite canine unit has been brought out of retirement to strike fear into the hearts of ivory smugglers across the African continent.
The dog detectives, who work with handlers from the African Wildlife Foundation (AWF), are tasked with scouring luggage and shipping containers across ports and airports in search of animal parts.
Africa’s notorious illegal poaching industry sees tens of thousands of elephants killed for their tusks every year.
The grim trade is fuelled by a huge demand for ivory products in Asia, for use in traditional medicine or jewellery.
As recently as last month, Kenyan officials seized nearly two tons of smuggled ivory after recalling a shipment en route to Cambodia.
Though wildlife authorities are already cracking down on the trade, and China has announced it will shut down its ivory trade by the end of this year, the AWF hopes to supplement their efforts with its canine unit – which is the first of its kind to patrol airports across the continent.
Their most successful raids so far have been at the Nairobi airport in Kenya, where the dogs collared more than 40 traffickers last year.
Previously, Kenya had seen a total of just 51 seizures of ivory and other trafficked animal parts since 2008.
“If anything comes into Nairobi then I am pretty confident we are getting it,” Will Powell, the AWF’s canine director, said.
“We target specific flights, connecting flights usually, that are coming from Guangzhou, or Hanoi or Hong Kong.
“The dogs will then walk over the carousel and check the luggage. They can smell the ivory before the bag is opened – you can find ivory even when it’s old and dry because it still smells.”
Most smugglers will claim the ivory has nothing to do with them and even suggest it was slipped into their luggage, unbeknownst to them, by corrupt officials.
“There is CCTV all over the airport, so we will know if someone put it in their bag,” Powell said.
The unit also sniffs out ivory stashes in African ports and occasionally comes across groups of armed smugglers.
In those cases, the dogs are trained to go straight for the armed smuggler before biting the hand closest to the weapon – and they bite down hard.
“What we have to remember is that every piece of ivory, every single bangle, has come from an individual animal that had to be killed for it to be made,” Powell said.
“So whatever the circumstances of these smugglers, it’s not an excuse.
“They know now that we are onto them, a lot of them have been told – be careful about Nairobi.”
The dogs, which are trained to chase down smugglers and subdue them if they try to run, have also sniffed out ivory in Uganda, Mozambique, Botswana and Cameroon so far. – The Telegraph