CSI Bloodhounds

Dodi, Sabrina, Lila, Stella and Lilly – these are the names of five bloodhound puppies that in March last year travelled from Europe and the United States to the Virunga National Park on the eastern border of the Democratic Republic of Congo. Eighteen months on, and now young dogs, they form part of an elite ranger and canine unit – known as Congohounds – dedicated to protecting the Park’s wildlife against poachers.

The first initiative of its kind in central Africa, Congohounds use the outstanding sniffer skills of bloodhounds to track, apprehend and arrest the heavily armed poachers whose presence in Virunga make it one of the world’s most dangerous national parks.

Virunga, a UNESCO world heritage site of over 7,800 square kilometres, has exceptional diversity with a unique variety of habitats that support lions, buffalos, hippos and elephants. It‘s also the only park on earth to have three great ape species – chimpanzees, eastern lowland gorillas and around 200 of the world’s 800 or so critically endangered mountain gorillas.

Over the past two decades, the poaching of nearly all of these animals has increased dramatically. The effect on the park’s wildlife has been devastating, especially for elephants and hippos, whose numbers have been decimated. From one of Africa’s most buoyant population of 25,000 only around 1,200 hippos remain and fewer than 400 elephants survive from the magnificent herds that once numbered over 3,000 individuals.

It’s not just animals that the poachers turn their fire on; the rangers that protect them are targets too. Since 1996, over 130 rangers have been killed protecting both Virunga’s animals and other wildlife that passes through it. Many others have been kidnapped and mutilated. Although rangers are now armed and receive military training, it was acknowledged that further support was required in the Park, not just to defend its wildlife, but also to track down and bring the poachers to justice.

It was agreed that an expertly trained team of bloodhounds and handlers could comprise a unit to do just this, reducing significantly the number of wild animals illegally killed as well as locating critically injured rangers. And so, Dodi, Sabrina, Lila, Stella and Lilly arrived in Virunga alongside Dr Marlene Zähner, an internationally recognised expert in man trailing from Switzerland.

One of the world’s top bloodhound trainers, Zähner (pictured below left) freely donated her time to lead the training programme of the dogs and their handlers, plus a group of rangers acting as guards, to make this possible. Supported by volunteers from Germany, Ursula and Marcel Maierhofer, both crime scene investigation (CSI) detectives, and police officer Swen Busch, the Congohounds’ training started in May 2011.

Typical training included working at simulated crime/poaching incidents where techniques for photographing and preserving the scene and securing and handling a scent article (an item with the poacher’s smell on it) were learned.

It’s with a scent article that the bloodhound’s amazing sense of smell comes into play. Once a bloodhound fixes a scent, it is able to isolate and follow that single scent – even one 300 hours old – from millions, following it over very long distances during periods of several days.

Since Virunga has so many varied habitats, tracking scenarios have been recreated in villages, savannah, swamp, rain forest, mountains, and on water. Building in intensity, each training session has developed the unit’s skills further, as Congohounds handler David Nezehose explains: ”The training exercises are always changed and adapted to the level of the team. We also change the scent article and training scenario to make sure everyone is being challenged, including the ranger [guard] whose job it is to secure the working environment and protect the dogs and handler at all times.”

As well as training on the ground, time has been spent in the classroom studying veterinary care, debriefing, report writing and sketching skills as well learning advanced CSI strategies and tactics. Of the early days of training, Zähner was impressed with Virunga’s rangers saying: “Handling a man-trailer [bloodhound] is a difficult task and it takes a long time to learn. The handlers here are all strongly motivated and among the most talented and most empathic I have ever worked with. If it continues like this, we will succeed.”

When Zähner said this, little did she know that events in Virunga and eastern DRC would test the skills of the Congohounds just a year into their two-year training programme, much sooner than anyone had expected.

On March 3, 2012 Emmanuel de Merode, director of Virunga, was flying over the Park on aerial reconnaissance when he spotted an elephant carcass, a victim of ivory poachers. Alerting standby rangers for immediate operation, de Merode also called out the Congohounds for their first deployment in what he described as “a big step, their first anti-poaching operation, before completing full training”.

Driving through the night, the Congohounds arrived at the scene the next morning. The sight that faced them was both brutal and horrific; the elephant’s face had been grotesquely hacked off to access its tusks. There was little left in the way of evidence, just tracks trodden over by lions and hyenas attracted to the rotting elephant and a few broken branches. Having to use the carcass as a scent item, the dogs picked up a trail some five days cold.

Following the trail over seven kilometres, the Congohounds closed in on Nyakakoma, a fishing village where the poachers were hiding out. Rangers later made armed contact with the suspects and recovered an illegal cache of weapons after the poachers fled the scene. The Congohounds’ successful role in their first operation demonstrated the effectiveness of their training and also cemented their role in what de Merode described as “protecting Virunga’s vulnerable elephant population as demands for ivory increase globally”.

De Merode was referring to the increasing number of elephants being slaughtered for their tusks by well-armed criminal rings throughout Africa, selling lucratively their ivory, especially to Asia. In Virunga alone, 10 elephants were killed last year, followed by a further 15 this year.

Unfortunately, the rise in elephant poaching hasn’t been the only challenge the Park has had to face this year. In April, just a month after the Congohounds’ first deployment, the fragile peace that had established itself in 2008 after the civil war, which had plagued eastern DRC and spilled into the Park after the 1994 Rwandan genocide, was shattered when the M23 rebel movement started fighting against government forces.

No longer able to guarantee the safety of its visitors, parts of the Park were closed to tourists. By May, the violence had spread into the Park and its gorilla sectors. Various militia groups including Congolese anti government groups, Ugandan rebels (ADF Nalu) and displaced Rwandan forces implicated in the genocide (FDLR) established themselves in camps in the bush, carrying out sustained artillery offensives against ranger quarters and killing animals to fill their own bellies as well as sell, raising funds for new weapons.

It has also been reported that one rebel group, working with a very small number of rangers who have defected from the Park, is boosting insurgency income by offering unofficial gorilla treks to tourists. De Merode has described this development as one that “puts the gorillas and the visitors at risk” and has condemned them in “the strongest terms”.

Despite this, and with bombs dropping around them, the training of the Congohounds has continued. When it has been too dangerous to venture into the bush, further veterinary and tactical studies have been focused on in the classroom.

Motivated and determined, the Congohounds remain ready for deployment, on permanent standby to protect the incredible wildlife of a unique national park that is Africa’s oldest. And against a myriad of complicated and deadly threats, none of its own making, Virunga needs its Congohounds more than ever.