So what did Betty find when she almost fell into the stream? She had followed a lead but reported no discovery. Her sign would be freezing, she would stop dead in her tracks, says Ronja Becker, Betty’s owner with the DB logo on her pants. “It was probably just a muskrat.” The rodents are not protected and are not among the endangered species that Betty tracks down, explains geoecologist Becker. Becker has a tablet hanging around his neck. In it she writes down where her dog finds endangered species.
Dogs have a much finer nose than humans
In the past, railway employees had to laboriously search for the animals themselves. They didn’t find all of them in the shaggy undergrowth and in old, winding buildings. They could also only search in the warm months, which many species spend in winter quarters. “Dogs can sniff out endangered animal species even at zero degrees,” says Becker. Lizards in holes in the ground. Bats in old barns. Dogs have 220 million olfactory cells, which means they have a much finer nose than humans.
Deutsche Bahn has only been employing so-called species detection dogs for a good three years. They were already in use on the second Munich S-Bahn main line and at the new ICE factory in Dortmund. Ten of these snoopers work for the railway, four others are currently completing their one-year basic training. Betty came to Ronja Becker when she was one. The dog belongs to the railway company, but when she is not tracking down endangered species, she lives with her handler in Pforzheim. Cocker spaniels like her are good working dogs: lightly built, persistent and capable of learning.
How does Betty even know what to look for? To demonstrate her training, Becker lifted a long metal box out of the company car – the smell box. Holes in the cladding are connected to chambers via a sliding labyrinth of pipes inside. Becker fills these with utensils: lizard skin goes into one and lizard droppings into another. Becker can open additional pipes using a smartphone app. Betty wags her tail excitedly. She already knows what’s coming next.