To make sure flora and fauna are well protected in South Africa, Southern African Wildlife College is active in the Southern part of Africa.
What does Southern African Wildlife College do
- Provide a program for kids in the area to make them understand and respect the nature around them
- Educate rangers so that they let tourists enjoy the national parks in a way nature is not harmed
- Fight poaching of rhinos.
Fight poaching of rhinos
This last task they do also with dogs they train – called K9.
In 7 months or more, the dogs are trained in the national park. They learn to chase the smell of a poacher and follow it until the poacher is in sight. As a herd of dogs, most of the time 5 dogs in total, they then surround the area and wait until the rangers arrive to catch the poachers. As the area they work in is quite a dense forest, and the dogs are a lot quicker runners (max. 40km/h) than humans, they chase the poachers by themselves after being dropped on the trace with a helicopter.
Each dog has a sensor so that the ranger can follow them with a GPS tracker. The moment the dogs are in a circle, the rangers know the poachers are found and don’t run anymore. For the dogs this is a game, as they never learn to attack the poachers, they just try to win from them while running.
When a track of a poacher is found and the dogs are released to find them, this team now has a success rate of 96%. The result is that poachers try it less in this area. The next challenge is helping other areas to arrange their anti-poaching.
As poaching is a threat to biodiversity and entire ecosystems we hope the rhino will be protected this way in South Africa.
