Tracking and Conservation K9 Group are a small husband and wife team with K9 and security company in South Africa. We have anti poaching and security contracts in the local area and have been working for the past 10 years.

In 2015 we sponsored an antipoaching K9 to the Kruger National Park; after we noticed the need for cold spoor tracking K9s to follow the poachers killing rhino. Shortly after he started working we started receiving phone calls asking for us to supply more K9s. Since then we have bred, raised, and trained 13 bloodhound / doberman cross K9s that were brought from us and sponsored to the KNP by various organisations and fundraising bodies. We sold all of these K9s at ‘cost price‘ as they were going to work for such a good cause. We have relied on our scout and security contracts to keep the kennels going, to allow us to feed and house our K9s. We have put in many thousands of Rand of our personal savings towards the training of these K9s, and spent hundreds of hours with the dogs ensuring they are up to standard; to be able to work successfully in the war against rhino poaching we ensure all our dogs can take a 5-10km track, of at least 12 hours old before they are permanently deployed. We also spend countless hours with the K9s new handlers to ensure that the team will function effectively in the field.

With the raising costs of living in South Africa, due to the current political state, we are now finding it harder and harder to keep up with our training. To make sure we can feed the dogs (and even ourselves), we are having to spend more and more time just ‘making ends meet’ with the security business, and thus we have less and less time to spend dog training.

The easiest solution we can think of to increase our efforts with K9 training, is to purchase a dog trailer. This will allow us to train up to 5 dogs at once; saving us time and at a 5th of the fuel cost, it will be a worthy purchase for us. However the initial cost of the trailer is currently beyond our means, and we would like to ask for help to purchase one.

The more dogs we can train, and the quicker we can get them to their positions in game reserves, the more we can affect this war against the rhino poachers.