It’s a dog of a journey from Belfast to Kuala Lumpur, but Flo and Lucky have made it big in the Far East’s movie industry.

The three-year-old black labrador bitches are thought to be the first dogs in the world trained to sniff out the chemicals used to make optical discs. They are being used in Malaysia in the battle against music and film piracy.

A month-long trial has been so successful that the Malaysian Government now wants to establish a canine anti-piracy unit with dogs trained in Northern Ireland by a handler who usually teaches dogs to find bombs.

The labradors can find, but cannot distinguish between, burnt, replicated, legitimate and pirate CDs and DVDs. But they have already helped officials to uncover more than 1.3 million counterfeit DVDs and CDs worth some 15 million ringgits (£2.23 million) in nationwide raids on warehouses and shops since their arrival in Malaysia in March, Iskandar Halim, a senior enforcement official in the Domestic Trade Ministry, said.

The labradors have been so successful that they attracted death threats after their first bust, discovering a million pirate DVDs and CDs in March. The authorities said that there is a bounty on offer to anyone who eliminates the dogs, though the amount is not known. The animals are being kept in a secret location.

“The dogs are a genuine threat to the pirated disc syndicates, hence the instruction to eliminate them,” Firdaus Zakaria, enforcement director at the Ministry of Domestic Trade and Consumer Affairs, said.

The dogs are on loan from the Motion Picture Association of America (MPA) and are due home in August.

Malaysia is one of the hubs of Asia’s huge trade in pirated films, music and games. The MPA says that big entertainment studios lost $1.2 billion (£600 million) to movie piracy in the region last year.

The dogs, which cost $17,000 to train, take only ten minutes to check boxes that security officials need a day to examine.

“They have been well trained to specifically smell the unique chemicals that go into polycar-bonates and the solvents that glue the DVDs together,” Mike Ellis, from the MPA, said.

He added that the dogs were getting film-star treatment in five-star animal accommodation, which includes a whirlpool spa where they can cool down after a hard day on the scent of the DVD pirates.

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