Canines On The Conservation Front Line
Man’s best friend is an invaluable partner to wildlife rangers. Across Africa, a multitude of different breeds support anti-poaching efforts. With their keen sense of smell, canine conservation heroes are game changers in tracking human poaching suspects, locating snares, and finding wounded wildlife.
The Wildlife Ranger K9 Challenge is brought to you in partnership with Working Dogs for Conservation (WD4C), the world’s leading conservation dog organisation. With a focus on law enforcement, biosecurity, ecological monitoring and environmental justice, WD4C consults, collaborates and leads capacity building for detection, tracking and discriminations for dogs and handlers around the world.
We’ve collaborated to put our ranger teams to the test in a specialist K9 Challenge, and we’re encouraging public supporters to get involved too. Further details of the K9 challenge will be revealed soon.
Meet the K9 unit of Mkomazi
Humans have a mere 5 million scent receptors in their nose. Dogs have over 200 million, making them a game changer for wildlife protection. Our partner in Tanzania, Honeyguide, established a K9 unit in 2011 in the Kilimanjaro region and within 2 years, all elephant poaching ceased. For the first year the Wildlife Ranger Challenge will hold a K9 mini-challenge, giving dogs and their handlers the opportunity to demonstrate their extraordinary skills.
Prizes to highest achieving rangers made possible by Lady Holmes.
