CNN
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Poachers flee Zimbabwe’s Imires Rhinoceros Wildlife Conservation Society at high speed with a fresh warthog carcass in tow. The only traces of his crimes are blood splatters, footprints, and tire tracks, but traces are all a hunter needs to become the hunted.
He was arrested a short time later, courtesy of Singer, a Belgian Malinois who retraced the entire 2.8-mile (4.5 km) route to the poacher’s home and led an anti-poaching team there.
The chase last October finally began far away, in the sleepy Welsh town of Carmarthen, where Singer was born and raised. It is home to the kennels of Dogs4Wildlife, a nonprofit organization that trains dogs to support the Anti-Poaching Unit (APU), an initiative that protects endangered wildlife across southern Africa.
The facility is run by professional dog trainers Darren Priddle and Jackie Roe. After seeing a photo of a poached African rhino on social media in 2015, the pair decided to combine their love of wildlife with their careers in raising working dogs for police, security and military operations.
“It was a very horrifying image. We sat down and said, ‘Okay, that really affected us,'” Priddle told CNN.
“In the UK we can deploy dogs to track people looking for drugs, firearms and explosives. So why can’t we look at fostering dogs that we were training for protection work?”
Since then, the pair have shipped 15 dogs to five countries in sub-Saharan Africa, including Mozambique and Tanzania, with each dog bred by them in south-west Wales.
They typically give birth to one or two pups each year. Dutch Shepherds and Belgian Malinois are two of the most common dog breeds for tracking, while Labradors and Spaniels are usually chosen as detection (detection) dogs.
Training begins on the second day of life. Priddle admits that sounds juvenile, but believes the early imprinting program provides a strong foundation for formal training, which begins about six weeks later.
“There’s a lot of scientific research documenting the exposure of puppies to different temperatures, different surfaces and textures, and different odors, as well as what they put in their nursing crates when they’re very young,” he explained.
“It just helps their brain and helps activate their synapses. We’re seeing a lot of progress in those puppies.”
The curriculum closely follows that of a typical police or guard dog, with an emphasis on obedience, tracking, and scent detection for sniffing out rhino horn, elephant ivory, and bushmeat.
The only significant difference in the training process is getting your dog used to the sights, sounds, and smells of the lions, giraffes, and countless other species you protect. Trips to local zoos are being organized to desensitize puppies to African wildlife as rhino and elephant numbers are severely lacking in Carmarthenshire’s wetlands.
Dogs are typically ready for assignment after 16 to 18 months. Priddle accompanies each of them on the long flight to their new home and spends the first month with the anti-poaching unit, providing field and animal welfare training to the rangers, but the farewell is never easy.
“The transition from spending every waking moment with a dog and building a very strong relationship to letting it go is challenging and difficult,” Roe said.
“But while it breaks my heart to see them leave, I know they are going for the greater good.”
Easing the pain is a WhatsApp group chat set up by Priddle and Law to keep in touch and offer advice to the various reserves and reserve APUs.
It has become a particularly active forum, especially given that it provides training and consultancy to teams with existing canine units, such as the Akashinga Rangers, Africa’s first all-female armed anti-poaching force monitoring Zimbabwe’s vast Pundundu Wildlife Reserve.
Unsurprisingly, updates on their success are a source of immense personal pride for both men back in Wales. Mr Singha’s pursuit victory in October followed that of fellow Belgian Malinois Dunn, who alerted the team to a trapped rhino calf in South Africa’s KwaZulu-Natal province in 2013.
Such wins demonstrate the “game-changing” value of such dogs when incorporated into conservation efforts, the duo claim.
“Once these sanctuaries brought specialized dogs to their wildlife sanctuaries, word quickly spread that APUs were actually able to capture poachers more efficiently and successfully,” Priddle said.
“In some smaller wildlife reserves, poaching of all kinds has been almost completely eradicated thanks to the deterrent that dogs provide.”
Riley Travers, park manager and anti-poaching officer at Zimbabwe’s 10,000-acre Imile Reserve, has had a front-row seat to Singa’s influence for the past seven years, as well as Dutch shepherd Muruwi, who paid for the training through fundraising by students at the local Harare International School.
Travers explained that dogs can travel as much as 10 kilometers (6.2 miles) per hour in the dark when tracking, allowing rangers to “make the night their own” and adding a valuable level of versatility and unpredictability to their arsenal.
And time and time again, Shinga and Muruwi have used body language alone to alert troops to potentially deadly threats from poachers and predators.
“They have been responsible for several rescues of our members on the ground and the arrest of a significant number of poachers,” Travers told CNN.
“It has had a huge impact on security in Imire. Poaching has decreased significantly and K9 units play a big role in that. It is not a silver bullet, but it is a tool that can make a big difference.”
Zimbabwe was once home to several thousand rhinos, but by 1992 poaching networks had decimated the number to fewer than 450, according to conservation charity Save the Rhino.
Thanks to efforts in Imire region, where the 23rd rhino was born in 2023, the country’s rhino population could return to the 1,000 mark in 2022, but statistics continue to show a dire situation across the continent.
The number of African rhinos poached each year has steadily declined since a peak of more than 1,300 in 2015, although nearly 600 were still recorded killed last year, according to Save the Rhino. This contributed to an overall decline in the total African black rhino population in 2023, even though white rhino numbers are increasing.
And the impact of each loss goes far beyond statistics, Priddle and Roe explain, especially in the smaller reserves that Dogs4Wildlife focuses on, which have significantly fewer anti-poaching resources than the continent’s most famous parks.
Lowe recalled the sight of a dehorned 25-year-old bull rhino and an 8-year-old male killed by a poacher in Limpopo province, highlighting the wider environmental ramifications.
“The vegetation they cut, the seeds they spread, all the other animals are affected. You think the rhinos are just gone, but it’s the whole ecosystem that suffers,” Lo explained.
“The owner of the reserve had a 25-year relationship with the bull. Losing a dog after 10 to 15 years grieves us. Experiencing the impact that losing these two rhinos had on the owner of the reserve gave us extra motivation.”
“It was really scary. I never want to see it again.”
Dogs4Wildlife has its sights set on the long-term goal of one day opening professional training and dog schools within Africa, and mobilizing future generations is a key part of its overall mission.
The conservation club, called Siyafunda Ngemvelo, which means “learning in nature” in IsiZulu, has hosted more than 180 South African children at the reserve as part of its wildlife education programme.
Mr Low said that before local people wanted to protect rhinos, they first needed to understand the animals’ value to the environment.
“We have to start with the basics: children taking responsibility for their wildlife,” she added.
“Once they have the passion, they will become future rangers, not future poachers.”
