THE 'PAW'SITIVE FORCE

Alert and agile, these dogs are more than petsthey're partners in tracking poachers in dense forests.

Anuraag Singh explores how man's best friend protects wildlife

REWIND to May 2011, a military working dog. Cairo, who was on the verge of retirement, was the lone non-human soldier in the US Navy SEALs team that hunted down al Qaeda founder Osama bin Laden at a compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan. Five years later, another Belgian Malinois breed canine, Conan, forming part of the US armed forces tier-one special mission unit, Delta Force, chased the then leader of ISIS Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi into a tunnel in Syria in October 2019, forcing the terror leader to blow himself up. Nearly five years later, as many as 13 dogs of the same breed, are helping the Madhya Pradesh forest department in tracking and solv ing the gravest of wildlife crimes in the dense forests of the central Indian state.

Forming part of the department's 16-canine strong-dog squad (three others are German Shepherd dogs), the 13 Belgian Malinois canines, aged between 18 months and seven years, are currently helping specialised state tiger strike force (STSF) in cracking poaching cases in different jungles of the state.

This breed, developed in the Malines area of Belgium in the 1800s, is famous for being intelligent, agile and alert.

Besides Belgian Malinois canines, three dependable German Shepherds, aged between one and six years, complete the 16-member squad, which is perhaps the biggest sniffer and tracker dog contingent of any forest department in the country. And, it is currently deployed in the seven tiger reserves and at other places with STSF across the state.

They have cracked 280 wildlife crime cases since 2016, resulting in the arrests of 759 poachers and co-conspirators.