Mat's canine team 'nose' best

Sniffer dogs are soon to be twitching their noses in Sri Lanka to help a local charity's efforts to trace landmines swept up by the Boxing Day tsunami. Max Hall spoke to the Mines Awareness Trust to find out how trained canines are helping the charity's relief efforts

The painstaking process of reducing suspect areas is made easier and quicker by an enthusiastic hound with its keen sense of smell. According to Ben Remfrey, operations director for Mat, a dog can walk up a 15-metre lane and do the necessary detection work that would take a human de-miner as long as a day.

'They're brilliant for area reduction,' he said. 'And it gives a lot more quality and cost-effectiveness to projects.'

Fully-trained dogs add the quality control needed in projects by bringing an operation up to international mine action standards.

'The dog's nose never lies. It's 800 times better then ours and a dog can find a mine at a depth of 40cm. Most anti-personnel blast mines - the type that people step on - are never this deep. Dogs can therefore easily find them.'

Mr Remfrey's latest venture into mine detection dogs follows his recent Specsavers-funded trip to assess the threat from tsunami swept landmines in Sri Lanka. Two decades of internal conflict left the country contaminated with mines and other remnants of war.

Government officials commonly estimate that both they and the rebel Tamil Tigers planted about 1.5 million landmines. Since 1999, more than 700 landmine and unexploded casualties were recorded.

The UN believes the latter figure is much higher.

Before the Boxing Day tragedy, Mr Remfrey had worked with members of a Sri Lankan charity, the Community Trust Fund, so that they could provide mine risk education to more than 32,000 people including 7,000 schoolteachers.

But the Boxing Day devastation undid much of the good. The tsunami destroyed minefield markings and washed mines into unknown areas, leaving hundreds of thousands of displaced survivors under threat. Many have little knowledge of the dangers.

'Children are particularly vulnerable as many landmines look like toys to them. Being smaller, they tend to suffer a lot more if a landmine does explode,' said Mr Remfrey.

He added that his investigations last month in the country were humbling and said the road to recovery would be a long one.

'Surviving the tsunami, then losing your life, or the life or limbs of your child to a previously marked landmine, is not an option that these brave people ought now to be facing.'

But working with sniffer dogs offers some hope. Funding came in from Unicef, which solved Mr Remfrey's first priority - helping the CTF recover. But his investigations found a greater need.

Both the United Nations Development Programme and the government are looking to bring Mine Free Planet - a small but effective Sri Lankan organisation - up to the national requirement for mine clearance. With a few handlers and a canine crew of six German shepherds, a Belgian shepherd and an Australian shepherd, the charity is looking to Mr Remfrey to provide it with technical assistance.

'It's a brilliant operation and these dogs are going to be able to release areas very quickly. It will mean that displaced people can move back into their homes.

'We've got to train the handlers to be de-miners so they know what to do when the dog detects a mine. It's really exciting, particularly as this is the first dog centre in south-east Asia.'

Funding from Specsavers will be used to build a sustainable project. It will also help with the de-mining efforts of other agencies, particularly when it comes to saving time.

'Sri Lanka has approximately 200 million square metres which are suspected of containing landmines and unexploded ordnance.

A manual de-miner may be capable of clearing 70 to 100 square metres in a day, while a well-trained dog-handler could feasibly do 5,000 to 10,000 in ideal conditions. This shows how useful dogs are in ensuring assets are used in the right areas.'

Mr Remfrey stressed that sniffer dogs were rarely harmed in mine detection. Those that do not qualify for the role are used as security dogs in other areas such as airports.

He added that he was currently looking to assist the White Pigeon Prosthetics Clinic, part of the Tamil Rehabilitation Organisation, which has fitted nearly 2,000 limbs in Kilinochchi.

About 90% of them went to landmine victims.