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 ver...