February 24, 2016
Tatjana RosenDirector, Panthera’s Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan Snow Leopard Programs
It’s Wednesday morning in Bishkek, the capital of Kyrgyzstan, and I’m at the Canine Training Center of the Kyrgyz Customs Service. A gleeful “tchouuuu” fills the air as N, a dog handler, cheers on her subject. Vesta is one of four dogs chosen to become Kyrgyzstan’s first wildlife detection dogs, and she has just successfully identified snow leopard parts in two randomly placed bags. This is one of many exercises Vesta and the other dogs will perform in order to learn, identify and master new scents. A split second after N’s encouraging shout, a tennis ball bounces off one of the bags, and Vesta, wagging happily, leaps in the air to grab it.
Vesta is almost two years old, and is a Malinois-German shepherd mix, as are her sisters Venta and Vikki, also in the wildlife detection program. The fourth dog is Orion, a German shepherd who looks like a little bear. All four are already trained in detecting narcotics, and this week and next, Aimee Hurt from the Montana-based
Working Dogs for Conservation (WD4C) is here to train the handlers and dogs in three new scents: snow leopard, argali sheep and ibex.
Snow leopard, argali and ibex are the most illegally traded species in Kyrgyzstan and in the Central Asia region in general. Yet this trade goes largely undetected, because Customs and Border control of Kyrgyzstan are not equipped to find and identify wildlife parts that are often expertly concealed or passed off as a legally hunted species. As a result, the skin, bones, organs and other parts of these three species can be easily smuggled across borders – until now. As demonstrated in sites in Africa and Southeast Asia, trained dogs can expertly identify the parts of a particular species.
The illegal wildlife trade poses a significant threat to snow leopards and their prey, and all of us here at Panthera are thrilled to be working with the Kyrgyz Customs Service to launch this pilot training program with support from the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe and the skill and expertise of trainers from WD4C.
Once the training program is complete, these four dogs will be deployed at border sites identified as hotspots for wildlife smuggling. Stay tuned for more updates!