Detective dogs sniff for illegally trafficked wildlife

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is severly underfunded and under staffed.  In fact, Los Angeles, one of the busiest ports of entry into the United States has just eight full time inspectors.

These dedicated inspectors are stationed along the U.S.-Mexico border, both the Long Beach and Los Angeles shipping ports, the International Mail Facility, as well as the Los Angeles International Airport.  At the mail facility alone, each month, more than 1 million pieces of mail must be carefully inspected to make sure packages don’t contain endangered species or their parts. 

U.S. Fish and Wildlife inspector Mike Osborn estimates they are catching less than 30 percent of the illegal animal and animal parts that are smuggled into the United States daily. The problem is simply to big, his department’s resources are too small. 

Enter Lockett. 

She’s a 4-year-old Labrador Retriever trained by the USDA. Lockett is a K-9 Fish and Wildlife inspector.  She is one of just four K-9s being used by this agency, hard to believe, when U.S. Customs and Border Patrol, the DEA and other federal enforcement agencies have been using K-9s for years.

This is a new program for the FWS.  It’s still considered a pilot program being studied and considered by the headquarters in Washington D.C.

Our TechKnow team spent about an hour with Lockett as she inspected packages at the International Mail Facility. The rise of internet commerce which makes it possible to buy anything anonymously, has made it very hard for fws inspectors to keeep up with illegal animal parts being mailed to the U.S.

Within the first thirty minutes we were there, Lockett had already sniffed out a python skin wallet.  It is illegal to import or export python products to or from the U.S. 

Her handler Ray Hernandez tells us while it may take a human inspector a full day to check one hundred packages, Lockett can easily clear one thousand in just one hour.

When asked why the FWS isn’t using more K-9s to help lighten the load for their human colleagues, District Supervisor Erin Dean simply tells us, she would love to have more “Locketts”.  She has in fact, requested an additional K-9 inspector for the Southern California district. 

Faced with dwindling federal budgets, Lockett is so efficient it makes fiscal sense to use her and other K-9s at ports of entry. K-9s are already successfully used by other government agencies to detect explosives and drugs at our borders.

There is also a natural symmetry to using a four-legged creature to help save other creatures that are on the brink of extinction. 

See Lockett in action this Saturday on TechKnow at 5:30PST/2:30EST