A Poacher’s Dog
The voiceless victim.
When a person searches “Poacher Dog” or “dogs used for crime” online, only articles of anti-poaching dogs and other service dogs who are on our side of the fight comes up. But what about the other side of the spectrum; what types of lives do the dogs that belong to poachers have? What types of training methods do they use to train their dogs to hunt? What lives in the mind behind those wild eyes of the Africanis dog- the canine that roams the streets of rural villages, seemingly invisible to the eyes that pass by? And most importantly, what happens to them when their world and ours collides?
That is why I have decided that is was time to give them a voice, and also talk about one of the hardest tasks of the ranger.
When you drive through the countryside, you will see many dogs of all shapes, sizes and colors, most of them collar-less. Some of them will be trotting behind a person or foraging for food in a dumpsite, or lying in the road, hit by traffic. It paints a painful but common picture of the Africanis dog, a dog that has been shaped by the African conditions to become the hardy, loyal and adaptable dog that it is today. Unfortunately poor living conditions and animals rarely go hand in hand, and often these dogs are visibly emaciated, mangey and in some circumstances even rabies positive. Dog fighting in the poor communities is a prevalent but often unaddressed issue, but it is on the protected areas and game reserves where we clash into contact and get up close and personal with the lives of dogs that are being used to commit a crime- and have no choice in the matter.
In South Africa, dogs can only be used legally in hunting practices if done with a permit for retrieving birds during bird hunting and for the purpose of tracking wounded animals in a legal hunt. This means that a person can only hunt ordinary game with a dog if he carries a valid license/permit and hunts under the direct supervision of the land owner. Not only do poachers break this law, but the cost of their actions can accumulate to several transgressions of several acts, including; Trespassing Act 6 of 1959, malicious damage to property, Stock Theft Act 57 of 1959, Game Theft Act 105 of 1991, Fencing Act 31 of 1963, National Environmental Management Biodiversity Act 10 of 2004, and the Animal Protection Act 71 of 1962.
Dogs are being trained to hunt illegally in various different ways, most often from the young adolescent stage in their lives when they would be starved off food to encourage their natural instinct to hunt. The dogs would hunt in packs, learning from the older dogs how to respond to their maters’ whistles. The dogs’ job is simple- locate prey, chase it down and start to rip it apart. This allows the hunter/poachers to catch up quicker and kill the prey by stabbing it, spearing it, or bludgeoning it to death with a knobkierie. The dogs will get the intestines as a reward to encourage hunting in the future, that is, if the hunt was successful. Returning home empty-handed often means that people will be more reluctant to share what they have with unsuccessful hunting dogs.
Many protected areas have a shoot-on-sight policy when is comes to finding poachers’ dogs whilst they are found hunting, a sad but necessary action for many reasons. Despite the fact that the majority of these dogs live in horrible conditions and health, they wreck havoc on game- wounded animals often have to be put down by game owners. Several people have tried to rescue poacher’s dogs that were caught in the bush and rehabilitate them to no avail; the need to hunt could not be broken, and a farm dog that hunts animals could never be tolerated. By putting the poaching dogs down, the poachers had to deal with the setback of having no dogs and staying away longer before he could return with another pack of hunting dogs, if not diverted off to another area. It has been known that when community members realize that a game reserve has a shoot-on-sight policy, they will throw unwanted dogs over the fence into the protected area, knowing that the dogs can not get out again and that the ‘problem’ will be taken care of.
Terrified, underweight and wounded by a bushpig in a hunt earlier that day. This female was tied to an outside wall with no water in the plastic bucket. Image taken during a search- and arrest operation in Hoedspruit area.
The law is vague when it comes to whether traditional hunting practices are legal or not and varies between the different provinces; Limpopo Province has a handful of communal lands which allow hunting, one of which (the Makuleke Program) even conducts successful limited trophy hunting. South Africa’s legislation seems unclear or even conflicting with the laws within each tribal area that allows hunting, and many grey areas need to explored. In Zululand’s past, where large parts of community land was governed by their own King, a hunter had to request the permission of the elders to hunt, and ‘royal’ items such as ivory or leopard skins had to be sanctioned by the King. Today, the trade in new ivory is not permitted but the demand for leopard skins still exists. Even though the possession of a leopard skin without a permit is not legal, thousands of people continue to wear them for ceremonial and traditional rites. This demand for leopard skins has caused a country-wide slaughter by people, Zulu and non-Zulu hunter alike who can earn anything up from R4,000.00 for a leopard skin.
In less that a month, two leopards were poached by snares on neighboring game reserves in the Northern Drakensberg mountains by Shangaan poachers, one of the leopards being a mother of two cubs who were never found after her death.
In Zululand, a good hunting dog is a hunter’s prized possession. Hunting competitions would be held and a winning dog would be determined based on the amount or value of the animals that the dog was able to hunt. The stakes of these illegal competitions are high, and dog owners can win considerable amounts of prize money, also increasing the winning hunting dog’s value, resulting in mass uproar and community backlash whenever these dogs are shot by game rangers on protected reserves.
In rural Zululand, feral packs of dogs were reported to have been unnerving people with their aggressive behavior. It was even claimed that these packs have hunted and killed humans before, but I was not able to find any articles or evidence to support those statements.
K9 Conservation has rescued, rehabilitated and successfully retrained two poachers’ dogs- Yule, a greyhound puppy rescued during Christmas of 2018 when she decided to abandon her master and change sides/ seek political refuge with K9 Conservation and Nsimbi, an Africanis male who was rescued by Anke Kruger in 2022 after the field rangers hit a contact with poachers.
A picture that says it all- A conservation dog running along the fence on the inside of a protected game reserve, poaching dogs on the outside. Picturing K9 ZIngela, Conraad’s first working dog and cornerstone of K9 Conservation.