Will Powell spent the past 20 years training dogs to sniff out land mines and bombs in Afghanistan and other war zones. Now his dogs have a new target: ivory smugglers.

Powell, director of canine conservation for the African Wildlife Foundation, has spent the past two months training a team of eight dogs and 14 human handlers to sniff out wildlife crime in Kenya and Tanzania. The team—the first of its kind—graduated Friday morning and will be deployed to the ports of Dar es Salaam and Mombasa, where they will work to block illegal ivory shipments from leaving the country.

More than 60,000 of Tanzania’s elephants have been slaughtered over the past five years. At the same time, the ivory of elephants from many other countries often travels through Kenya and Tanzania on its way to markets in Asia. Both ports have been identified as high-traffic areas for these illegal goods.

“The elephants are in such a bad state here,” Powell said from Kenya. “It’s so tragic. We’re not going to be able to fix that with this team, but we can make it much harder for these smugglers.”

The dogs came to Africa from breeders in Hungary and the Netherlands. Their handlers are veteran rangers employed by the Kenya Wildlife Service and Tanzania’s Wildlife Division. They spent the past two months working with Powell, developing relationships with the dogs and learning how to care for them, something that doesn’t come naturally in countries where pet dogs are not common.

RELATED: Saving Africa’s Elephants—in the United States

“We spent about two weeks in the beginning of the course just focusing on communicating with the dogs,” Powell said. “It’s a new approach for them, a new way of dealing with animals that involves being fair and kind and not forcing anybody to do anything. That’s pretty cool when they get that.”

After that, the dogs trained with small pieces of ivory and other wildlife products, learning how to sniff out the forbidden substances.

“The skills acquired by both the rangers and the canines that have completed the training program are of immeasurable importance to both Kenya and Tanzania, and we look forward to utilizing those excellent and rare skills,” Robert Muasya, Kenya Wildlife Service’s deputy director of security, said in a statement.

Friday’s graduation ceremony will be followed by a brief period of acclimation at the ports to get the dogs ready for work. Once the teams are deployed, Powell will visit them every few weeks as part of a “cradle to maturity” approach that will help ensure the dogs have long, productive careers. The African Wildlife Foundation has also embedded experienced trainers in each country to support the rangers and the dogs on an ongoing basis. “These are ex–dog handlers, a Kenyan and a Tanzanian, who I trained before and who worked for me or for clients in Afghanistan as bomb-dog handlers,” Powell said.

“This is just the first step of the journey together,” he added. “I’m going to be excited when we start finding stuff.” The smugglers, on the other hand, may not be so happy.