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.
Poaching
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.
It
is here that over one million wildebeest, and tens of thousands of
other animals cross from Tanzania into Kenya on their annual migration,
attracting hordes of tourists, but also poachers seeking an easy target.
Lema
Langas, 30, a Maasai from the local community, who is warden of the
canine unit, said the main challenge in the park was poaching for the
commercial bushmeat trade, with dried meat exported to Uganda, Rwanda
and further afield.
"Thomson's
gazelles, impalas, giraffes, buffalos and during migration season when
the wildebeest are here they become an easy target... (poachers) put
down wire snares or maybe they can chase them into valleys and use
machetes to cut them," he told AFP.
Elephants, lions and other members of the famed "Big Five" also get trapped in the snares.
Rangers
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."
The bloodhound
puppies are being trained by former police officers Linda Porter and her
husband John Lutenberg, who spent decades hunting escaped convicts
across the United States.
The couple
trained and brought the first two dogs to Kenya in 2009, however one was
so terrified by all the unusual smells that it impacted his tracking.
Tech
The new crop of puppies were born in Kenya "and are progressing very fast," Porter told AFP.
In
the late nineties, the Mara Triangle, which makes up a third of the
entire reserve, was crippled by rampant poaching and such bad insecurity
that one ranger recalls "tourists being robbed, stripped and dumped on
the side of the road".
Management of
the reserve was then taken over by the Mara Conservancy, a
public-private partnership with the local Maasai community.
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.
"The conservancy is hiring
the sons and daughters from this community neighbouring the park... if
the community learn there is someone having a bad intention to kill an
animal," they will come forward, he says.
Cooperation
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.
During
migration season, in July and August, the rangers find thousands of
deadly snares set up in the park, and Langas recalls removing 511 in a
single day last year.
Translating
poaching arrests into convictions has long been a "major struggle" in
Kenya, Takita said. However since Kenya boosted its wildlife law in
2013, this has improved.
Fine
"The
fact that you are getting imprisoned for life or fined Ksh20 million
($20,000) is a deterrent. A huge amount of people — those small-scale
poachers — are all deterred and that is great for us."
Ivory
poaching may garner the most attention, however a 2014 report by a
government-appointed taskforce warned that bushmeat poaching was going
largely ignored and had hit "unprecedented levels" in Kenya.
The
report cites one case, in which a vehicle was stopped with 6,000 kilos
of bushmeat heading away from the Mara region, worth an estimated
$11,000.
"This practice is unsustainable and could lead to the extermination of many species," said the report.
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