Ilu, along with her handler Sanjeev Sharma from the forest department at Kuno National Park, are due to undergo seven months of training at Indo-Tibetan Border Police’s (ITBP) National Training Centre for Dogs to protect the recently-released cheetahs, ANI has reported.
During the course of the training, Sharma shared that Ilu will be trained to detect tiger and leopard skins, bones, elephant tusks and other body parts, bear bile, Red Sanders, and several other illegal wildlife products.
Once the training is over, Ilu the canine will get deployed on the job from April next year.
As per the standard guidelines issued for India's wildlife sniffer dog force, the pair are to be together till their day of retirement. For Sharma, Ilu is like a child, who he picked up for training when she was just two months old, he told ANI.
“Ilu is not supposed to protect cheetahs because they can protect themselves, she will be deployed on the periphery of the national park along with forest guards to protect cheetahs and other animals from poachers,” said Sharma told ANI.
The ITBP told Indian media that the special training is being conducted in collaboration with TRAFFIC (a wildlife trade monitoring network) and WWF-India (World Wide Fund for Nature India) and shared an example of the Railway Protection Force (RPF) deploying wildlife sniffer dog squads to help detect smuggling through the railway network.
Apart from Ilu, six other dogs will get training to protect the wildlife and will be deployed at various national parks of the country including in Maharashtra, Karnataka, Chhattisgarh, Odisha, Uttar Pradesh, Gujarat and Tamil Nadu.