The goodest girl: Meet Tessy, the German Shepherd sniffing out MRT cable thieves one theft at a time (VIDEO)

KUALA LUMPUR, April 26 — Tessy may look like any other trained sniffer dog at first glance, but along the Klang Valley’s MRT rail alignments, her keen sense of smell has become a quiet yet formidable ally against a persistent and evolving threat.

Tessy, a seven-year-old female German Shepherd, is now at the forefront of Prasarana Malaysia’s latest efforts to outsmart increasingly sophisticated cable thieves targeting the combined 116km stretch of the Kajang and Putrajaya MRT lines.

According to her owner, Yew Wai Cheong, Tessy was not initially trained to sniff out concealed cable-cutting tools or track down thieves in hiding who might otherwise evade human detection.

“She was not my dog from the beginning and I adopted her from a very good friend of mine back in 2021.

As a matter of fact, Yew was already familiar with Tessy before her adoption because he had been looking after her brother from the same litter and when the opportunity arose, he took it.

During her time with him, Tessy served as a personal protection dog and was also involved in providing security services.

Nose for trouble, heart for duty  

Outside of her professional work, Tessy enjoys hiking, swimming and roaming through the woods and waterfalls in Kampar and Ipoh, Perak where Yew hails from.

She does not have a particular favourite food and is not a picky eater, as Yew puts it, ‘as long as she’s fat, she feels grateful’.

Her special quirks? As Yew puts it bluntly, Tessy is ‘a bit of a handful’— she sometimes knows she is not allowed to behave in a particular way but does it nonetheless.

“When I took over, she had received some training, but she has a lot of talent yet unfortunately it was not polished; but I could see she has very good potential,” he told Malay Mail during an interview near the MRT Taman Naga Emas station recently following an after-hours track inspection.”Even though she knows there will be consequences, she does it anyway but afterward, she’s very apologetic.

“But when it comes to work, she is serious. She understands and dares not misbehave as you could observe just now,” he said.

Molded and forged for the frontline

Although possessing a specialised set of trained skills, Yew said Tessy did not initially come under Prasarana’s sniffer dog initiative, which began around December last year.

He said the security company he worked for initially reached out to him to employ Tessy for a similar initiative under the East Coast Rail Link (ECRL) project, but the plan never materialised.

Still, Yew said he saw through Tessy’s training, which took roughly about a month and a half, during which she was familiarised with cable-cutting tools, how to identify unauthorised inpiduals and potential hiding spots during track inspections.

Lacking prior experience in rail track inspection using a sniffer dog, Yew obtained feedback from Prasarana’s auxiliary police and management to tailor Tessy’s specialised training.

“These include training her to seek out thieves that may be hiding under the track walkway, which is difficult to see under normal circumstances,” he said.

Before rail track inspections, both Yew and Tessy were assigned a more challenging and higher-risk duty — patrolling inside the MRT’s elevated viaduct hollow structural sections.

“That was much more difficult compared to the tracks...low oxygen, humid, dusty and if something were to happen, you have nowhere to go (because of the confined space).

“And sometimes when you reach the joints between the viaducts, the piers can be very high and you might fall,” he said.

Yew said the most challenging part was conditioning both himself and Tessy to work in such harsh environments inside the viaducts.

“One kilometre inside the viaduct equals three times the travel length on the outside, so the dog must be in very good condition from beginning to end.

“And for people who have not been inside the viaduct before, they have no idea how tricky it is,” he said.

So far, Yew said there have been no direct confrontations with cable thieves inside the viaducts but numerous tools, footprints and fingerprints have been found since they first started.

“Of course we do not wish for a confrontation because in such a situation, the suspect may decide to retaliate since they have nowhere else to run.

When asked if the risks ever scared him, Yew did not hesitate to admit that they do but added that he is not one to romanticise danger or “play superhero” in real life.

“Superheroes are good for movies, but not for real life.

There are some situations where, if you can avoid it, you avoid it. But of course, there are also situations where we have to confront it. So it depends.

“So far, Tessy has been doing great,” he said.