When Kisha heard “soek” (search), the malinois dog raced up and down a meadow sniffing for pangolin scales, before lying down in front of a pile of leaves under which they were buried on the Midrand campus of the Endangered Wildlife Trust (EWT). Another dog, Reaper, indicated a drawer in a desk with her nose during the demo: inside was a test tube smaller than a finger, with the scent of succulents that are being widely poached in South Affrica.
These scent-detection dogs from the EWT’s Canine (K9) Conservation Unit are like Cheslin Kolbe scoring a try: fast, focused and fearless. Police apprehension dogs tend to be more like a Pieter-Steph du Toit, chasing and tackling poachers to the ground with a similar tenacity and ferocity. Like the Bok champions, they are in their element on the move and achieve great results.
“If the dogs and the handlers are not enjoying their work, they are doing something wrong,” says William Powell, the head of Kuru Dogs. Kuru has trained more than 70 dog detection teams in Africa, which are working with wildlife and other authorities in countries like Mozambique, Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda.
Conservation dogs protect humans and nature, experts like Powell told the EWT’s African Canines in Conservation Conference 2025 in March.
Scent-detection dogs are trained to find endangered species, from tiny succulents to tortoises and pangolins, and can pick up odours underground, from giant bullfrogs to landmines.
They can help find a child who is lost in the bush, as happened in Kenya recently when a Masai boy was found at dusk before hyenas came out to hunt, sniff out smuggled ivory or drugs in bags and boxes, and give farmers early warning on zoonotic diseases.
The greatest irony in dog training is that real progress happens when you forget obedience and start understanding the dog in front of you
— Jennifer Hartman, co-founder of Rogue Detection Teams
Detection dogs can pick up avian flu in an infected bird even before it shows symptoms says Michelle Liebenberg, the founder of ScentConserve, which trains scent detection dogs.
Such early warnings could help to protect wild bird colonies — avian flu is currently spreading in the sub-Antarctic, threatening seabird species — and save billions of rands in agriculture, she says.
In 2023, 8.5-million chickens were culled because of avian flu, triggering price increases and shortages.
Breeds like malinois, border collies, German shorthair pointers and spaniels are good scent-detection dogs and should ideally be selected from working lines and have a powerful toy drive, so they are easy to reward and train.
Delta, a three-year old border collie who has been trained — and in turn trained her handler Esther Matthew from EWT — ticks all the boxes.
A guardian of rare species, Delta has been active in cross-border roadblocks and been helicoptered onto Cape mountain peaks to assist teams with insect surveys in a habitat where climate change could push species like rare beetles to extinction.
• October 13 2023: During a pilot project for the succulent anti-poaching teamanti-succulent poaching team, the dogs sniffed out a conophytum, about the size of a blueberry, in a car during a roadblock. Further up the road, the team found a box of discarded succulents which had been tossed out of the same vehicle, with a street value of about R2.8m.
• 9: Number of succulent poachers detected by dogs leading to four arrests, with three suspects pleading guilty to date.
• 6,350: The number of succulent species that grow in the Karoo, more than 30% of which are endemic.
• 500,000+: The number of succulents that are poached every year in South Africa
— Karoo succulents face extinction
Delta is a member of the world’s only canine team working against succulent poaching, which has shone since its early days as a pilot project, doing busts which have led to arrests and the accused pleading guilty, says Matthew (see sidebar).
Delta can detect at least 15 distinct scents says 33-year-old Matthew, an EWT drylands conservation programme specialist who has worked in this field for more than a decade. “One study showed that dogs could distinguish up to 40 odours in line-ups.”
Last week, Matthew was working at a roadblock on the Western Cape's west coast with four of the EWT’s eight K9 dogs, together with law enforcement agencies such as the SAPS. She says the EWT also has funding this year for biodiversity projects with conservation dogs, including one to monitor three endangered diminutive tortoise species.
Matthew’s first dog, Jessie, found a giant bullfrog which lives underground 11 months of the year during her master’s research project. Jessie's next research project was a critically endangered riverine rabbit, and she helped Matthew and the team identify the tracks of a De Winton’s golden mole, which hasn’t been seen in 80 years.
Jennifer Hartman from Canada — who has worked in wildlife conservation in the Greater Limpopo Transfrontier Conservation Area and across Africa — teams up with another type of dog to do multispecies research with great results. Hartman’s Rogue Detection Teams select “fetch-loving rescue dogs” and her first boisterous partner, Scooby-Doo, played a major role in conservation research, contributing to more than a dozen published papers about species and ecosystems in his career.
The floppy-eared black labrador lookalike identified more than 40 target odours “from scats and nests to carcasses, traps, toxins, and eggs”, Hartman said in a remote presentation to the EWT conference.
“Some worry this could distract a dog from rare targets like cheetah scat or waste valuable field time. In reality, teaching multiple odours enhances the dog’s problem-solving ability, motivation and trust in their handler. It keeps them engaged, rewarded, and thinking. More importantly, it allows us to contribute not just to one species’ research but to entire ecosystems findings,” said Hartman, who worked with Scooby from Cambodia to South Africa and further north collecting wildlife data.
For example, during the Limpopo Transfrontier Predator Project in 2015, they removed 135 wire snares, discovered nearly 200 butchered carcasses and documented 525 poaching events, she said. Back on his home turf, Scooby was an equally talented detective, finding, for example, the scat of an endangered caribou buried in waist-high snow.
“The greatest irony in dog training is that real progress happens when you forget obedience and start understanding the dog in front of you,” Hartman said. “For months I struggled [with Scooby]. I forced my expectations on him. I tried to change him into my idea of a working dog and I failed. The moment I stopped trying so hard and I trusted Scooby and let him think for himself, that was when everything changed.”
Kuru Dogs, founded by Will Powell in Tanzania decades ago to support conservation organisations, also empowers dogs during training by “shaping them” rather than barking commands at them. “Rigid training doesn’t always work and that is why we have moved to shaping [by] using praise,” Powell says.
“Handlers learn on experienced dogs and then, when put together with new dogs, they fly.” Pairing the right dog and handler is crucial, he says. One pair, for example, conducted 48 busts at the Jomo Kenyatta International Airport in Nairobi, Kenya.
Showing a video clip of a spaniel sniffing luggage for contraband at an airport, its whole body wagging in excitement, Powell says its signals are clear: “I speak malinois better than spaniel but [anyone can see] that tail wagging.”
These working dogs enjoy the search and get rewarded with praise, treats and/or typically a fetch toy, like a Kong. When the dog team this week found no succulents after screening 140 cars on average at the roadblock, the handlers requested permission from drivers to hide plant material on the vehicle to reward the dogs and keep them motivated, Matthew says.
Louise Wilson, the founder of Conservation K9 Consultancy, says that improving the welfare of working dogs increases their efficiency and she has simple tools for this, like a licking mat.
“We need to consider their emotional state. We all love arousal in dogs during searches but that has fallout, leaving them stressed,” says Wilson, who has decades of experience. Chasing a toy is fun but doesn’t relax them, she adds.
“I’ve been using licking mats for dogs for 30 seconds, with something like pâté on it. This calms a dog down, leaves its mouth soft and it is ready to search again. I have a licking mat hanging on my [hip] and, when the dog is getting over the threshold, he can nudge me for it.”
Even pet owners can adopt this tactic, giving their dogs a chance to lick something tasty off a ridged, rubber, toxin-free mat (similar to those under a drying rack) to become calm before they go out. “That is the best way to leave a dog,” says Wilson.
Veterinary technician Carly Roche cared for hundreds of military working dogs during her 20 years in the US Army and is now volunteering at SFW Conservation, just outside the Kruger National Park.
“I do free training on field medicine for dogs,” says Roche, who travels with a life-size, 15kg “fake dog” which she uses for demonstrations. Her master’s research was on the Temminck’s pangolin and she has moved to Hoedspruit to support canine conservation work.
Not every dog is suited for this, says Powell, describing one of his own dogs as “sweet and handsome but not clever”. He sharpened his dog-training skills working with landmine- detection dogs — a role also played by African giant pouched rats — but now he is immersed in wildlife conservation.
The key to success is the right dog-handler match, says Powell, who has interviewed hundreds of applicants wanting to train as dog handlers. “I do not care if they have experience, qualifications or rank. What matters is how they touch a dog, their timing, if they have the interest and if they have heart.”
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