29/10/2026
There are working dogs that do scent work and then there are the front-line conservation ‘soldiers’ of Green Trax. Millie of LandenVlei, an extra special 5-year-old English Springer Spaniel, has become an ace snare detection specialist.
Poachers can lay 200 snares in a single session, causing awful suffering to any animal that gets caught in them. A research study showed that human patrols tend to only locate 10% of these traps. Having trained high-performance dogs for several decades, Ruan and Tina wanted to put their superior senses to work to see if their dogs could achieve better results. Instead of simply training Millie to detect human scent left behind (which disappears quite quickly), they trained her to ‘smell’ the metal the snares are made from. The results are astounding: thanks to Millie’s marvellous nose leading the Snare Busters division their success rate exceeds 60%!
We are proud supporters of the important conservation work the Green Trax team does, playing our role in keeping their elite K9 unit in top physical condition with Peak Performer, the natural choice for working dogs of this calibre.
If you’d like to learn more about Ruan, Tina and their pack, please visit: https://greentrax.org
