You can always reach Kim on the phone. Both day and night he and his dog Kaos are ready to move out to help road users and hunters, who have hit or wounded an animal. Kim is a “Schweisshundefører” or tracking dog handler, and together with his three colleagues he handles the around 330 searches on Bornholm each year.

The Danish “Schweisshunderegister” is a registry of specially trained tracking dogs and handlers, covering the entire country, who can help anyone who accidentally injures wildlife.

The handler works closely with his specially trained dog, and together they are educated and certified by the Danish Nature Agency, to handle searches and put down injured wildlife. Kim has trained Kaos, a Kleiner Münsterlander, since the dog was only 6 weeks old, and it took two years before they were both ready for the qualifying test. Now they have finished their education and has worked for nearly three years.

The work is unpaid, even though Kim estimates that he uses probably 25 hours a month on searches, mainly during the night.

Kim and his colleagues mainly work after the sun sets, therefore light is an important safety factor, and as Kim puts it “the animal does not stay on the paths, so we have to go through all kinds of terrain, and if you don’t have proper light, you will fall and possibly hurt yourself”.

The 4 handlers on Bornholm are all equipped with the M6xr Multilamp for their searches. The dog works with its nose and doesn’t need light, but when the handler moves through dense vegetation, accidents can happen if you can’t see where you are going. In open fields Kim can easily activate the 2000 lumen, and from a long distance he can see where the eyes of the animal glows up. Then he knows that they are on the right track.

Suprabeam has sponsored the lights for the four dog handlers.