Mechem, the specialist demining subsidiary of the State-owned Denel 
defence industrial group, has started 
to expand its dog business. “We have seen that there is a market” for trained specialist dogs, reports Mechem CEO Ashley Williams. “Initially, we just used dogs for our own infrastructure and contracts. But we’ve seen that there is a desire out there to buy dogs. There is also a market for different dog specialisations – not only for a wide variety of detection dogs, but also for high-quality guard dogs. That is why we have decided to expand and go into this business.”

To this end, the company has started its own breeding programme to complement to purchase of puppies from reputable breeders, 
and has constructed a new canine facility at its base in Pretoria. “We have been fortunate enough to get the services of Dr Hannes Slabbert for our company,” explains Williams. “He’s a world-renowned expert in the breeding of working dogs.” Those dogs which prove unsuitable for detection work are found good homes, as they make excellent pets.

Dogs play a key role in the location of landmines and unexploded ordnance, which is central to Mechem’s work. “But we are also very 
involved in the security environment, where we need to detect different odours, which could be explosives, but could also be any other contraband, such as narcotics, endangered animal products – anything of that sort,” he elucidates.

Every dog specialises in specific odours. “The role of dogs is just indescribable. There is nothing else known to man at the moment that is as accurate and can smell odours to the low levels that dogs can.”

Mechem currently has some 120 dogs, of which about 48 are deployed in three countries – Angola, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and Sudan. To date, no Mechem dogs have been killed in the line of duty, 
although a number have died from illness, and all are repatriated to South Africa at the conclusion of a contract.

Some of the dogs in South Africa are employed in the Mechem Explosives and Drugs Detection System, or Medds. “Medds is a unique system, developed by Mechem in the late 1980s,” says Williams. “The whole idea is that we take the smell to the dog, instead of the dog to the smell. We capture the smell in a filter, which will release the odour at a later stage. The dog is run along a line of filters, and identifies any that have the targeted odour.”

In the field, dogs are susceptible to heat, need a lot of water – more than a human does – and can easily be distracted by birds or other wildlife. Medds allows the dogs to operate in a controlled environment, with none of these problems. “This multiplies the productivity of the dogs,” he highlights. “Where one dog at a border post could possibly do 20 cars in a day, in the heat, that same dog would be able to do 200 to 300 filters in a day – meaning that it would be 200 to 300 cars or trucks that he is actually saying yes or no to – that is, is the specific odour he or she has been trained to detect in that specific vehicle or container, yes or no?”

Regarding training and supplying dogs to others, the company has already supplied 
animals to the Royal Bafokeng authority and various schools and mines in South Africa. It recently received an order for 80 dogs from the Angolan Police. Mechem also provides training for dog handlers, and has done so for the South African Police Service, Metro Police services, and a number of international 
customers.

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