Guards of the wild

Kate Lewis 

Early evening in the Zimbabwean savannah, the light is fading. Lions begin to rouse from their daytime slumber, minds focused on dinner. But it’s not just lions hunting their prey in the African dusk, humans are too. Three men have been spotted on the conservancy with a rifle and backpack - poachers - hoping for a night-time rhino kill. 

Polaris, a sleek and muscular black dog in body armour is released, followed by another athletic tracker dog, Rogue. Handler, Samuel, follows behind. The dogs track the poachers and cover enough ground in just one hour, in low light, to find the men. The poachers panic, drop their equipment, including guns and heavy calibre ammunition, and surrender. Before night falls, the poaching team have intercepted and arrested a gang and recovered dangerous arms. Welcome to the world of the anti-poaching dog units. 

The mastermind behind this simple but highly effective use of dogs to prevent wildlife poaching is Daryll Pleasants, a military dog instructor. Pleasants served for eight years as a dog trainer in the Royal Army Veterinary Corps before leaving to set up a dog training business in 1998. It was following a volunteer trip to Ol Pejeta Conservancy in Kenya, assisting dog teams in their training that he realised what difference dogs could make to anti-poaching patrols. From this, Animals Saving Animals was founded in 2016, which now trains and provides anti-poaching dogs to conservation organisations across the world.

Poaching is big business — one rhino horn can reach in excess of £200,000 — and the demand for horn continues to grow, particularly from Vietnam and China. In the last 10 years more than 7,000 African rhino have been illegally killed. In South Africa, the number of rhinos poached increased by an incredible 9,246 per cent from 2007-14. Recent figures released from the South African government show that poaching is still at crisis levels. 1,028 rhinos were poached in South Africa in 2017, making it the fifth year in a row that over 1,000 rhinos have been illegally slain. Yet, the introduction of anti-poaching dogs has made a real difference to poaching levels. At Ol Pejeta, only two rhino have been poached in two years, and the last northern white male rhino on earth, Sudan, is being protected from poachers by dogs here. Pleasants believes his dogs are helping reduce poaching rates by up to 72 per cent in some areas.  

— The Independent