Successful annual balance of the 26 service dogs in the Austrian customs office
Vienna (OTS) – 26 service dogs were on active duty for the Austrian customs office in 2022. Thanks to their efforts, the customs officers were able to apprehend a total of 2,230 police dog handlers and their four-legged partners in the previous year. During these seizures, the dogs sniffed out, among other things, 11,600 kg of tobacco, 2,746 cigars, 170 kg of narcotic drugs and 1,471 tablets of drugs. With their keen sense of smell, they also uncovered two species protection offenses and seized around 830,000 euros in cash, including counterfeit money.
Two exemplary successes: One of the drug seizures, for example, is the work of service dog Kliff, who reported a shipment of 480 grams of herbal cannabis and 110 grams of cannabis resin in April of the previous year. In this case, the smugglers were particularly unscrupulous because the substances were hidden inside a child’s toy.
As part of a vehicle inspection on the A5 motorway in October, the service dogs Django, Toro, Cado and Nex were able to impressively demonstrate their skills and sniff out a total of 13,000 cigarettes with a total value of around 3,500 euros in various hiding places in a car – including in the door lining of the sliding door .
“I would not only like to congratulate our service dog handlers, but also thank them for the great commitment that has led to this record of success. From these figures we can clearly see how important this part of the Austrian customs office is. Our customs officers have a high-quality education, work highly professionally and also have the most modern technology at their disposal. But the highly sensitive noses of our service dogs are also an important addition when it comes to efficiently tracking down smuggled goods,” said Finance Minister Magnus Brunner.
An animal career in the finance department
Since the modernization of the financial administration and the associated structural changes, the service dogs and their dog handlers have been assigned to the mobile control teams and thus support customs operations nationwide and at the relevant checkpoints with their fine noses. For example, the service dogs are used for checks at airports, on motorways or in e-commerce distribution centers. “The work of the mobile control teams generally enables a high degree of specialization in our work. The use of service dogs, for example, makes a lot of sense when checking e-commerce shipments, because this allows our customs officers to work very efficiently. The excellent training and the fine sense of smell of our dogs enable us to check large quantities of shipments in a comparatively short time,” explains the head of the Austrian customs office, Heike Fetka-Blüthner.
6 of the active dogs passed their service test to become a fully operational service dog last year. Like their colleagues, they also specialize in cigarettes and drugs, cash and drugs, or species protection and drugs. “We only use positive reinforcement when training our dogs. The work should correspond to the dog’s natural behavior, encourage it and be fun for it at the same time, so that it supports the work of the dog handlers with a high level of motivation,” specifies Stefan Konrad, head of the service dog department at the ZAÖ.
In the course of its career, each ZAÖ dog is trained on a specific combination of objects or substances, which it will help its human colleagues to find in the future. In the course of its training, a species protection detector dog learns, for example, to display up to 20 different smells and can thus detect snake skins, reptiles, parrot feathers, ivory or even living animals such as turtles, geckos and snakes.
2 of the service dogs of the Austrian customs office retired at the end of 2022 following 10 years of service. They usually spend this with their long-standing human colleagues, because the bond between the human-animal teams naturally becomes correspondingly close during the intensive working hours together. For 2023, however, the new admission – in this case the purchase – of the offspring is already planned, which will then step into the successful paw prints of the two retired dogs.
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