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DVD Pooches Under Attack

Fri., Mar. 23, 2007 9:31 AM PDT by Julie Keller

It’s a dog-eat-dog world out there, particularly for Lucky and Flo, the pooches who are sniffing out DVD pirates in Malaysia for the Motion Picture Association of America .

International crime lords have apparently put a price on their snouts, taking out hits on the two Labrador retrievers who recently uncovered nearly $3 million worth of illegal DVDs and CDs, according to various reports.

"The dogs are a genuine threat to the pirated disc syndicates, thus the instruction to eliminate them," Firdaus Zakaria, the enforcement director of Malaysia's Ministry of Domestic Trade and Consumer Affairs, was quoted as telling the New Straits Times.

MPAA spokesman Neil Gane told Reuters that Lucky and Flo were holed up in an undisclosed location and that precautions were being taken to ensure their safety.

"The Malaysian authorities are taking this threat seriously and the security around the dogs' current location has been beefed up," Gane said.

While the official price on their furry heads is currently unknown, it’s likely that the MPAA will do everything they can to protect the crime-fighting doggie duo. The organization spent nine months and $17,000 training the dogs to sniff for polycarbonates, the chemicals used to make the discs, before shipping them off to Malaysia, one of the world's top producers and exporters of illegal DVDs.

Upon arrival, the dogs dug up around one million illegal discs in an office building in the city of Johor Baru, a feat that resulted in the arrest of six men, raising the ire of the pirates and the praise of the MPAA.

"The dogs are some of the greatest employees we have here at the MPAA," Dan Glickman, president of the Motion Picture Association of America, told ABC News.

"Lucky and Flo's immediate success in locating DVDs in transit offers us a new and highly effective means of detection for counterfeit discs," Mary Callahan, the MPAA’s director of optical disc operations, added in a statement.

The disc-sniffing dogs are most certainly earning their kibble, given that DVD pirates cost the film industry an estimated $6 billion last year.

Glickman says the canines' recent success could be parlayed into an army of crime-fighting Fidos.

"Obviously, you need a volume of dogs to be effective,” he recently said in a statement. “The idea right now is to demonstrate their abilities to show that it can be done and maybe build a corps."

For now, however, the focus is on keeping Lucky and Flo from getting snuffed out.