So detection dogs are used for
conservation around the world.
They're used to find wildlife contrabands
and to prevent wildlife poaching.
In Bangladesh,
Asian Giant Tortoises was once found
throughout the hilly forest of
Chittagong Hill Tracts.
But due to
the destruction of their primary
mixed evergreen forest,
slash and burn agriculture practice,
chronic subsistence hunting,
in the next five or ten years
the remaining individuals
could be completely
wiped out from Bangladesh.
So finding tortoises is very difficult
in the forest.
That's his reward.
Yes! Aha!
It's not the tortoise itself.
Yes, the dog has a name,
and his name is Clive.
And I've been getting those videos
since Clive was just eight weeks old
and I'm hoping that we'll
be able to bring Clive to Bangladesh,
help saving tortoises.
For long-term conservation of the
species their population is not
viable anymore.
They're pushed to the
edge of extinction.
I feel angry,
I feel frustrated,
I feel extremely sad
because they are
such an amazing and unique species
and they have all the rights to
exist as much as we do.
My name is Cesar Rahman.
I'm a conservation
biologist based in Bangladesh.
I've been working to protect
turtles and tortoises in
Bangladesh for the last 10 years.
Our goal is to restore
a sustainable, viable wild population
in the hill tracts.
The Asian Giant Tortoises are one
of the largest tortoises in Asia.
They grow up to almost 30 kilos.
They are native to Southeast Asia,
found in tropical evergreen forest in
Bangladesh, Northeastern India,
Myanmar and Thailand.
Asian Giant Tortoise in Bangla
it's called Shila Kocchop
And in Mru tribal language
it is known as a Lipuk.
They are more vulnerable because
they are large-bodied species.
As a result,
the local people living in that area
have been depending on
them for subsistence.
And also there is some demand for
the pet trade.
Because of the
remote nature of the area,
top-down approach would never be
sustainable in that region.
So involvement of the communities is
very crucial for the long-term
sustainability of any conservation project.
Firstly, what we did,
we involved the communities
conducting surveys,
conducting field survey to find the
present distribution of that species
and other species as well.
So we have been doing with the hunters
is that we have been empowering them
and training them to be the parabiologists.
So these hunters, they have rediscovered
at least three new turtle species
from Bangladesh,
including finding
a remnant population of
Asian Giant Tortoises
in that region.
When you found out they are
so knowledgeable,
we are providing them with
basic training to conduct
ecological surveys,
camera trapping, radio tracking,
and these people have transformed
as conservationist
and they have become
the ambassador for conservation
in that region.
Around 2015 our parabiologists
started rescuing individuals
of Asian Giant Tortoises
from the region.
And we know that they're
found in scattered areas
and releasing them would not be a
wise idea because those locations
have no protection mechanism.
And we know that we have to take
drastic action.
That's when we established
our first conservation breeding centre
of Asian Giant Tortoises
in Bangladesh.
And for the first time,
we bred them in captivity in 2019.
It took us almost two years
to make that breeding happen.
It was an exciting moment for us
in the first year 46 hatchlings
were born in captivity
and this is giving us new hope for
the survival of the species
in Bangladesh.
There is a particular one we call
Number 16.
So she's doing very well.
She's growing fast.
And I have high hopes for her that
she will be able to make it in the
wild when she's released.
This is a whole new generation of
Asian Giant Tortoises,
and this is probably the
largest remaining population
of Asian Giant Tortoises
in the country.
It is important to
track and monitor once those
captive bred individuals are
released back in the wild because
we don't know what's going to happen.
They can be slow,
but they can also disperse,
they can move out to different areas
and also tracking them as to ensure
if in case they are poached,
because one question everyone asks like
the local communities have been
hunting them
and once those are released,
they will just hunt them again.
So when we monitored them
and tracked them,
we would be able to verify
and evaluate that this
conservation intervention
was indeed successful.
The tracking system we were planning
to use it's not very, very modern.
It's a technology which has been used
in the wildlife conservation field
since the 1970s.
So we are basically going to use
a VHF radio transmitter,
which provides a signal,
and we would have a receiver
and an antenna.
Our local community members
they would track them,
they would be trained to track them
and they would collect
information like the GPS.
We also need to know
down the road in the future
whether the species are breeding.
Radio telemetry has certain limitations.
So finding turtles is very difficult
in the forest.
So what we are planning to do
we want to employ
conservation detection dogs
in Bangladesh,
which would enable us to
find a relatively accurate
picture of the density
of the species,
and that would be able to tell us
whether the species you're releasing are
in fact end up breeding them
successfully in the wild.
And I've been getting those videos since
Clive was just eight weeks old,
and I'm hoping that we'd be able to
bring Clive to Bangladesh,
help saving tortoises.
We think about the work
we are doing is very important
because we're losing our biodiversity
in a very, very alarming rate.
And I believe that every species has a
right to exist as much as humans do.
And I feel that this is the time
that we need to be active
and take action before
before it's too late.