KarunaNews Story

Dogs4Wildlife is a non-profit that trains dogs to support anti-poaching units in their efforts to protect endangered wildlife across southern Africa. It’s run by professional dog trainers Darren Priddle and Jacqui Law, who decided to blend their career experiences of developing working dogs for police, security, and military operations with their love of wildlife, after seeing photos of a poached African rhino on social media in 2015. “It was quite a horrific image. We sat down and we said, ‘Okay, that’s really affected us,’” Priddle said. “We can deploy dogs in the UK to track people … to look for drugs, firearms and explosives, so why could we not look at developing the dogs that we were training for conservation efforts?” The duo has since sent 15 dogs to five sub-Saharan African countries, including Mozambique and Tanzania, each one bred by them in southwest Wales. Capable of covering as much as 10 kilometers (6.2 miles) an hour when tracking, even in darkness, dogs allow rangers to “own the night,” Park Manager Reilly Travers explained, adding an invaluable level of versatility and unpredictability to their arsenal. And on numerous occasions Dogs4Wildlife-trained dogs have alerted units to potentially mortal threats – be it from poachers or predators – through body language alone. “They’ve saved our guys on the ground on several occasions and they’ve been responsible for apprehending quite a few poachers,” Travers said.