Special training for four-legged friends in Bavaria: Our police rely on “cyber dogs” – they track mobile phones, sticks and hard drives. A new asset for the law in the fight against child pornography and right-wing extremists.
Wow! What four-legged friends can do. Furry friends who sniff out explosives, drugs, missing persons or corpses have proven themselves in police work for decades.
After all, there are more than 240 sniffer dogs active throughout Austria. The Ministry of the Interior is now going one step further. Because crime is increasingly shifting to the digital world. Data carriers are becoming smaller and smaller. Furthermore, USB sticks are often disguised as everyday objects such as lighters, pens or lipsticks. This makes it difficult for investigators to secure this important evidence.
Animal help requested from Bavaria
Now four-legged colleagues are getting on board. Two sniffer dogs received special training from the Bavarian state police. Within ten weeks they were trained to sniff data storage devices. They have been in use since the summer. One of them is “Esprit Stormcaller”.
The Belgian Shepherd takes laptops, cell phones, memory cards, hard drives, etc. from the most sophisticated hiding places. He has already been successful in detecting child pornography material and tracking down data storage media in the right-wing extremist scene.
The Ministry of the Interior wants to have another ten Cyberdogs trained by the Bavarian State Police – they are the leaders in this field in Germany. There are currently only a few trained electronic sniffer dogs worldwide, but demand is increasing.
220 million olfactory cells in the dog’s nose
Not only are dogs intelligent, a shepherd has 220 million olfactory cells (humans only have 10 million). That is why our four-legged friends also sniff things that we cannot smell.
The training of cyber sniffer dogs follows the same principle as other sniffer dogs. Individual substances are conditioned on a search wall. The animals’ willingness to work and their instinct to play and prey are used.
Source: Krone
I am Wallace Jones, an experienced journalist. I specialize in writing for the world section of Today Times Live. With over a decade of experience, I have developed an eye for detail when it comes to reporting on local and global stories. My passion lies in uncovering the truth through my investigative skills and creating thought-provoking content that resonates with readers worldwide.
