Canines Combat Wildlife Crime in Africa I help support anti-poaching efforts to protect wildlife in foreign countries... Meet Frank Muir of our US Fish and Wildlife Service. He visited South Africa & Kenya to review US supported conservation dog projects. Heres his story: One of the tools increasingly touted as innovative and effective to combat wildlife crime in Africa is the use of conservation dogs. At the field level, conservation dogs can be trained to help detect and investigate wildlife crime. In other roles, they provide safety to the rangers they accompany -- an important benefit to a high-risk job. Once the crime has been committed and trafficking is underway, conservation dogs can be used to detect wildlife products that have entered the supply chain. Since 1999, the Service has supported conservation dog projects, via its Multinational Species Conservation and regional wildlife grants programs, in five African countries. With increased urgency to counteract wildlife poaching and trafficking, it is important to learn from conservation dog projects on the ground about what’s working and what can be improved in the future. As such, I was thrilled be invited to travel to Kenya and South Africa last month to participate in a review of conservation dog projects across Africa. Our project assessment was co-led by Chris Aycock, President of the American Society of Canine Trainers, and Dr. Megan Parker, Director of Research for the non-government organization Working Dogs for Conservation. It was a whirlwind trip -- we visited nine projects in nine days across two countries. Each project was working under unique local circumstances, but certain challenges were common across sites – such as the difficulty of detecting clues in a crime site that is contaminated by other wildlife or people. More at: 1.usa.gov/1rURm6a
Posted on: Wed, 15 Oct 2014 07:30:00 +0000
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