Fresh warthog carcass in tow, a poacher speeds away from Zimbabwe’s Imire Rhino and Wildlife Conservancy. Blood spatters, footprints and tire marks are the only traces of the crime he has just committed, but a trace is all it takes for the hunter to become the hunted.
His arrest comes a short while later, courtesy of Shinga, a Belgian Malinois that perfectly retraced the poacher’s 2.8-mile (4.5-kilometer) route home, leading an anti-poaching team to his door.
Last October’s pursuit ultimately began much further afield, in the sleepy Welsh town of Carmarthen, where Shinga was born and raised. It’s home to the kennels of Dogs4Wildlife, a non-profit organization that trains dogs to support anti-poaching units (APUs) 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 told CNN.
“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?”
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