From Gatekeeper to Tracker: Finding Her Calling in A K9 Unit

The Story of Consolata Safari

Firstborn of Eleven

Consolata Safari grew up in Laikipia North, near Kimanjo, the eldest of eleven children, eight girls and three boys, raised by a single mother who had no income of her own. There was no father in the household. From early on, the weight of the family settled, as it tends to, on the one who arrived first.

She attended Ilpolei Primary School in Laikipia North, then St. Francis Girls High School in Doldol. After high school, she enrolled at NIBS College in Nairobi to study for an international diploma in tourism and hospitality. She completed one semester. The money ran out, and she had to stop.

For years, she had wanted to join the police. An uncle had served in the Kenya Defence Forces, and she had grown up with a sense that a uniform meant something, that it was a way of being someone who protected things. She went to police recruitment drives year after year. She was not selected. Eventually, she accepted, as she puts it simply, that it was not her path.

She moved to Nairobi and took a security job with a private company. She worked there for two years. The pay was poor. She kept applying to conservancies in Laikipia because she wanted to come home. Then, three months after one of those applications, Ol Jogi called her for an interview.

From The Gate to the Dogs

She joined Ol Jogi in general security, working at the main gate. It was during this time, working on the conservancy and around the wildlife that moved through it, that something shifted in her. She started to notice the wildlife. She started to care about them in a way that felt different from the professional distance of a gatepost.

When an internal advertisement went out asking whether any security staff were interested in joining the K9 unit, Consolata said yes. She was interviewed and selected. The unit was not new to Ol Jogi, but it was entirely new to her. What she had was the interest, and the management had seen enough to trust it.

Learning the Dogs

The training was run by a specialist named Benjamin, who came from South Africa. He began with the fundamentals: how to read a dog’s behavior, to fit the harness and leash correctly, to control the lead while moving through the field. Then came the theory: classroom sessions on olfaction, how dogs process scent, contamination and how to prevent it.

Scent management in the field is more precise than it might appear. When a handler needs to present a scent to a dog at a tracking site, there are three approaches depending on the circumstances. The most controlled method involves placing a gauze pad over a footprint without hand contact, leaving it for three minutes to absorb the scent, then folding it inside-out into a polythene bag to avoid contamination before presenting it to the dog with the command to smell. A second method involves bringing the dog directly to an article left by the subject. A third, used when neither an article nor a clear footprint is available, involves walking the dog into the wind at the point where a trail is suspected; the dog’s head snaps, a sharp involuntary movement towards the scent, tells the handler that something is there.

The unit currently has six dogs: Copper, Tui, and Checker, the established animals, and two younger ones, Serah and Ravi, and retired Diana. Each has a distinct character. Consolata knows all of them individually, not as a category but as animals with different behaviours, different responses to commands, different ways of working in the field. Tui, the most experienced, can track for up to eight or nine kilometres without stopping.

Serah and Ravi

Serah and Ravi are one year old. Consolata and her colleague Josephine Nanikan raised them from puppies, a process that began when the unit received young dogs and the handlers had to build the relationship entirely from scratch.

For the first three months, the work was simply about presence and trust: being with the dogs every day, letting them learn the handlers’ voices and movements, building the bond that tracking depends upon. Then came the first stages of formal training, sight and hearing exercises in which a handler would run into view of the dog, hide, call the dog by name, and reward it when it found them. Every day. The same exercise was repeated until the dog understood the game and wanted to play it.

After that foundation was set, articles were introduced. A decoy would leave an object at a spot, move away and hide, and the handlers would present the article’s scent to the dog and let it track. The dog followed the scent of the person who had handled the article, not just the article itself. Serah and Ravi learned this. They practised it until it became instinct. At one year old, they can now track four kilometres without stopping.

Two of the puppies from this cohort were donated to Loisaba once they were ready, and a third to Kisumu. All were trained by the same hands.”We are proud of them, because they came from our hands,” said Consolata.

Where she wants to go from here is clear. Consolata started as a handler. She wants to become a master handler, then a trainer, then a senior master trainer. The K9 work with the dogs is where she found something she did not know she was looking for when she first arrived at Ol Jogi, and she intends to follow it as far as it goes.