Dogs are last hope to find Cambodia’s diminishing tiger population
A 6 year old German wirehaired pointer called Maggie recently arrived in Cambodia for an unusual task; she had been shipped in to sniff out the tiger droppings within the largest nature reserve in Cambodia.
The dog was originally trained in Russia and is able to sniff out signs of larger wild cats as part of a national campaign to aid boosting the tiger population within Asia. The tiger population has plummeted to around 5,000 from double this number a century ago.
The dog has been scouring and sniffing undergrowth for tiger scent at the 3,000 kilometre Seima Biodiversity Conservation Area within north eastern Cambodia.
It is not clear how many tigers is actually still left in Cambodia, where local poaching and habitat encroachment are causing a huge decimation of the population.
The organisation had to turn to dogs after their field surveys and camera failed to find the large cats from the previous year. The sighting of a tiger in this area was in 2007 through a paw print which was found in the park.
“We think this is the best method when we have a large area and not that many tigers,” said Hannah O’Kelly, a wildlife monitoring adviser for the New York-based Wildlife Conservation Society.
Linda Kerley, one of the consultants at WCS who trained the dos in Russia said “As we gain the technology to extract things from scat like DNA and hormones, all of sudden scat becomes a gold mine of information.”