DVD dogs awarded medals

Lucky and Flo were awarded with medals as they ended a six-month assignment which the Malaysians claimed netted 1.6 million illegal movie disks.

According to the Sydney Morning Herald, Malaysia's deputy trade minister S. Veerasingham said that what the dogs had helped the country achieve in such a short time was remarkable. The dogs were loaned to the Malaysian government by Motion Picture Association which claimed they could be used to sniff out pirated CDs and DVDs.

Although they were trained to identify optical discs by the scent of their chemicals, Lucky and Flo could never tell the difference between real and pirated CDs. This was mostly due to the fact that they did not have opposable thumbs and could not operate a DVD player.

However that did not stop the MPA and the Malaysians, who are always keen to show they are clamping down on pirates, spinning a tale or two about the hounds.

Firstly they claimed the dogs were vital in the arrests of 26 pirates during operation double trouble. However the dogs were taken to a factory with 1.6 million pirated DVDs and other optical discs, three DVD replicating machines and 97 compact disk burners, worth $6 million.

One would have thought a dog with its hooter stuffed full of garlic could have snuffled out a few DVDs in such a situation.

Not satisfied with that, a story was 'leaked' to the press that Malaysian movie pirates were reported to have placed a bounty of $29,000 on the dogs, prompting them to be kept under close guard.

However this was never proven and no evidence for the story was provided. Now it seems that the MPA are going to use the dogs as part of their PR operations on US television. The idea is that knowing the MPA has a hound that can sniff out your legitimate DVD collection will fill pirates full of fear.

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