Most of us are familiar with the vest-clad beagle that hunts for illegal fruits and plants in the travelers' luggage at airports. Now, a species of giant pouched rat has been trained to fulfill a similar role in finding illegal wildlife products.
The rodents who underwent the training are African giant pouched rats and, despite their somewhat terrifying name, really only grow to be about 750 mm (about 2.5 ft) long from the tip of the nose to the end of the tail, with the tail taking up about half that length. While that's indeed big for a rat, it makes the animal small enough that it could wander among tightly packed crates in shipping containers to combat illegally smuggled products.
In a new study, 11 of the rats – with names including Attenborough, Fossey, and Thoreau – were first trained to stick their noses through a hole in their enclosure to receive a treat. Then, the rats were exposed to both non-triggering scents and those of commonly smuggled illegal wildlife products and trained to distinguish between the two. The non-triggering scents included electric cables, detergent, and coffee beans, which are all used to hide the scent of illegal animal products by smugglers. The triggering scents included pangolin scales, elephant ivory, rhino horn, and African blackwood, all of which are smuggled and all of which are considered in danger of extinction.
After learning to identify the illegal wildlife products, the researchers gave the rats a break and found that the animals were still able to identify them correctly up to eight months later – a feat that matches that of dogs. The research was carried out at APOPO, a non-profit organization based in Tanzania that previously trained the rat species to identify tuberculosis and landmines.
"Existing screening tools are expensive and time intensive and there is an urgent need to increase cargo screening," said Isabelle Szott, a researcher at the Okeanos Foundation, and first co-author of the rat study. "APOPO's rats are cost-efficient scent-detection tools. They can easily access tight spaces like cargo in packed shipping containers or be lifted up high to screen the ventilation systems of sealed containers."
The researchers now plan to outfit the rats in special vests equipped with a ball-capped cord the rodents can pull to trigger a beep when they encounter any of the illegal wildlife products in real-world settings. The researchers say the new squad of rats could not only help catch wildlife smugglers, but could also help fight other types of smuggling crime.
"Wildlife smuggling is often conducted by individuals engaged in other illegal activities, including human, drug, and arms trafficking," said Kate Webb, an assistant professor at Duke University, and the study's first co-author. "Therefore, deploying rats to combat wildlife trafficking may assist with the global fight against networks that exploit humans and nature."
The study has been published in the journal Frontiers in Conservation Science.
