Keno, a police dog with the Montezuma County Sheriff’s Office, helped put a Texas man in the dog house last weekend for allegedly possessing methamphetamine and paraphernalia used to manufacture the drug.

Brian Booth, 32, of El Paso, Texas, was stopped in his 1995 Chevy pickup truck Saturday evening when Eric Trap, a deputy with the sheriff’s office, noticed that the tail/brake lights of Booth’s vehicle were not working, said Lt. Kalvin Boggs, a sheriff’s office spokesman, on Monday.

After the police dog gave Trap reasonable suspicion to search the vehicle, back up officers were called in and helped to locate a small, black, plastic container holding an amount of methamphetamine, a glass pipe used for smoking meth and $5,000 in cash.

Trap said that possession of methamphetamine is a Class 4 felony, punishable by between two and six years in jail and a large fine.

Upon a more thorough search of the vehicle, officers found a number of materials used for manufacturing methamphetamine, including rubber hoses, funnels, coffee filters and an assortment of chemicals, Boggs said.

According to a police report in the case, Trap initially suspected that Booth might have been under the influence of alcohol or drugs at the time of the arrest.

Booth, however, refused to perform roadside maneuvers and would not consent to any kind of drug or alcohol testing, said Boggs.

"At that time, Officer Trap ran his dog, Keno, around the outside of the suspect’s vehicle," Boggs said.

A procedure such as the one Trap completed is completely within the limits of the law because it is not a time constraint for the suspect and does not infringe on a person’s personal space.

"When the dog was run around the outside of the truck, he alerted once near the passenger side door and twice at the driver’s side," Boggs said.

When police dogs are alerted to an illegal substance they will get excited, may bark and will start scratching in order to get at the drugs, said Boggs.

"During this recent meth bust, the dog tried to jump in the driver’s side door," he said.

Boggs said that the sheriff’s office tries to spread out the use of the dogs so that there is always one officer with a dog working during each of the day’s shifts.

"It is starting to pay off," Boggs said.

At a training session held Tuesday at the Montezuma County Fairgrounds, K-9 Deputy Mike Marston Jr. said that the dogs are trained to identify marijuana, methamphetamine, heroin, cocaine and the derivatives of each as well as perform a variety of other tasks.

"We go through about ten hours of training with the dogs a week," said Marston. "It’s all the training that allows what the dogs do to stand up in a court of law."

The officers said that because of recent fund-raising efforts throughout the community, the sheriff’s office now has three police dogs working for them.