Kenya uses dogs to help sniff out illegal ivory

Dogs known for their sense of smell have long been used to seek out drugs and explosives, but now Kenya is using them to find elephant ivory and rhino horn in the fight against smuggling and wildlife abuse. Claire Price of AFP reports. << SOUNDBITE  Philip Muruthi, African Wildlife Foundation     "We started this program of deploying sniffer dogs to detect wildlife products particularly at ports and transit routes because we are in a poaching crisis and Kenya is among the gang of eight countries so we did it to watch and to make sure that whomever tries to get ivory or rhino horns or any other animal products through our ports is not successful."

Philip Muruthi, African Wildlife Foundation  "The dog is able to discriminate between ivory and ordinary cow bone because it has a very high sense of olfaction or smell. Its organs of smell are many thousand more developed and capable of discriminating different scents than human, so it is just a matter of the equipment that it has; so if you want to think of a dog as a technology, you can think of it as such.”  

Mark Kinyua, Kenya Wildlife Service Canine Unit     “So we made arrest, after an arrest, after an arrest and all of them were at night. So, for example on Tuesday we had two Chinese, the following day we had another bunch of Chinese, the following day we had another bunch of Vietnamese and Thailand nationalities so that was quite memorable and that speaks volumes if you can arrest consecutively. That is a huge deterrent also.”