It's a dog's life for puppies training to go to work
Like 1 Dislike 0 Published on 16 Nov 2016
(13 Jul 2016) LEAD IN:
South African breeders are working to fill a worldwide shortage of highly trained working dogs, including German Shepherds, Malinois and Labradors.
Breeding specialised dogs for mining, tracking and detection is a science many are yet to perfect.
But in Pretoria, the latest batch of puppy recruits are already in high demand.
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They are just weeks old, but in under a year these puppies are set to become highly trained specialists employed to sniff out explosives, narcotics and other illegal substances.
Mechem Dog Training Unit, which is part of South Africa's state-owned weapons company, Denel, has started its own breeding programme to keep up with the demand for its highly trained sniffer dogs.
Hannes Slabbert, is the business unit manager of Mechem Canine Unit.
He says the company started its own breeding programme as " there is a shortage of good working dogs worldwide. You just don't find quality working dogs and numbers are just not… you can't buy them enough in South Africa and that is why we decided to rather start our own dog breeding programme."
He explains that breeding dogs for working purposes needs dedication from the start.
"Dog breeding is a science. If you just breed dogs and leave them in kennels and there is no programme and you don't stimulate them, especially from the 6th to the 12th weeks, that sensitive period, then they are just going to…they are not going to develop. So you have to expose them to situations they will encounter during adulthood. And you must have an idea what you are going to utilise the dogs for, so they have to be exposed to that. Leaving dogs there just to fend for themselves and just grow up… they will not become successful dogs."
Elizna Zehnder is a working dog breeder. She specialises in breeding Malinois, Geman Shepherd and Beagle puppies. She says she can't keep up with the demand for her dogs.
The three litters of puppies she has have been bought and future litters have also been sold out in advance.
Zehner's female German Shepherd, Bailey, was specially mated with one of Mechem's sniffer dogs that is currently working on de mining operations in Turkey.
Bailey's litter have already started with basic training.
Zehner says: "Well at the moment we have got three litters. We have got Beagles – puppies. They are less than a week old. They are really, really small. Then we have got Bailey's puppies. She has got eleven German Shepherd puppies. They are four weeks old. And then we've got Savannah's puppies. They are six weeks old. We are going to train them until twelve weeks, up to twelve weeks. Then Mechem or Braveheart take them further and do specialised training."
Zehner says one of the reasons her puppies are sought after is that they are played with and stimulated from a young age, which aids their development and confidence.
Along with her dog handlers she teaches them to fetch, to search for their ball, and to focus with various sounds as distractions.
Not all puppies become successful working dogs, but Zehner says all the dogs in her last few litters have become successful narcotics or explosive detection dogs.
"We have experienced from our last litters that if you handle the dogs correctly, right from the start, we can use all of them.Then it means you need the facilities, you need to keep your eye on every single dog. You have to pay attention to detail and then if you work on them individually we had the experience that they were all successful. They were able to become either explosive or narcotic dogs, depending on the direction they are going, but they were all successful."
Zehner's well bred and developed dogs come at a price. One Malinois puppy, for example, sells for 640 US dollars.
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