All of a sudden the rangers have
real teeth in terms of running down poachers.
Locating a recent downed elephant can not be difficult since the
animals’ mates will be visibly distressed and any observers will quickly pick
up on the signs. Now they have a tool
that allows hot pursuit without any fuss whatsoever.
An escaping poacher no longer has
a creditable lead time at all.
I am reminded of military raiding
doctrine applied in Northern France before the
D Day landings. A well planned mission
would go into the target and make the attack which rarely lasted minutes and
left any defenders either dead or seriously disorganized. The team then took of away from the target on
the run and ran for one hour normally along useable paths in the country. This left them six miles away and in a fairly
random direction from the target. Any
creditable response would need all of that hour to arrive on the scene and get
it together to attempt a pursuit with no intel on the proper direction to
follow. Common sense tells us it can not
be managed.
Blood hounds change that equation
by providing certainty regarding the escape route itself. A swift followup even hours later will catch
up a laden group on foot. In the case described,
the poachers obviously felt no reason to exert themselves and were caught up
close to the target. It will not be that
easy next time but the result will likely be similar unless they can get to a
vehicle quickly enough.
Once poaching becomes nearly
impossible it will end. This may turn out to be the best solution yet to this
problem.
Bloodhounds deployed to fight elephant poaching in DR Congo
by Staff Writers
The Democratic Republic of Congo 's famed Virunga National Park has
deployed bloodhounds to track down elephant poachers, a park official said
Monday.
"The first operation of the specially-trained bloodhounds was
launched after a succession of elephant-poaching incidents," LuAnne Cadd,
the park's public relations officer, told AFP.
"The operation lasted two days and resulted in an armed contact
between park rangers and suspected elephant poachers followed by the recovery
of an illegal cache of weapons," she said.
Two bloodhounds tracked the poachers, following their scent over a
distance of seven kilometres. There are a total of five bloodhounds deployed to
fight poaching.
Cadd said 11 elephants were killed in 2011 in Virunga and three in
January and February this year.
She said the European Union-backed canine project "will
have a significant impact on the poaching problem in the park, particularly in
protecting the vulnerable elephant population as demands for ivory increase
worldwide."
The dogs were trained for about a year at a special facility in Switzerland
The 7,800-square-kilometre (3,011-square-mile) park, created in 1925,
is the oldest in Africa and
was classified a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1979.
It is home to about a third of the world's population of rare mountain
gorillas and also has hippopotamuses and elephants.
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