These dogs are trained to smell the poachers who hide in the forests.
Kolkata:
The coronavirus pandemic has brought the world to its knees, but it does not seem to have intimidated poachers. Poaching increased to 151% during the lockdown, experts said. In this dark scenario, the forest department of West Bengal takes no chance and has just recruited two experts specially trained to suppress poachers.
They are not ordinary recruits, but they are experts on all fours.
Orlando and Shyana – a Belgian Malinois and a German shepherd – flew to Kolkata on Saturday after nine months of intense training at a school run by the BSF in Gwalior of Madhya Pradesh and will soon join the Bengal Forest Service to sniff out poachers. The dogs left to join their assigned posts – one in the Sunderbans in south Bengal, another in the Gorumara Forest Reserve in the northern part of the state.
They each have two trainers, who also spent 9 months at Gwalior school, training with them.
Two more dogs will graduate from school on June 30, bringing the state’s dog team to nine.
These dogs are trained to sniff out poachers hiding in the forests and to track them down at home.
Bengal had set up its dog team in 2017 with four canines. Another joined the team in 2018. All of them have contributed enormously to ensuring the safety of animals in the forests.
Last year, four people who had poached a rhino in Gorumara National Park in North Bengal were found and arrested. Earlier, the dog team had helped locate the smuggled ivory into North Bengal from Assam.
