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Natural History, Oct, 2002 by Stephan Reebs
Another animal could soon join sniffer dogs in the business of contraband detection. Rats have good noses, too, and as demonstrated by James Otto, of the University of Baltimore, and Michael F. Brown and William Long III, of Villanova University, they can be trained not only to recognize the smell of illicit drugs, prohibited foodstuffs, and dangerous explosives (as previous workers have found) hut also to search actively for those odors and adopt a particular posture when the search is successful. The scientists taught rats to stand on their hind legs if they detected the smell of cocaine and also outfitted the animals with a harness and long cable designed to "report" their posture to a computer. Laboratory trials in an arena containing twenty-five cups filled with bedding material (only one of which was scented with a simulated cocaine powder) yielded a correct-hit rate of 95 percent. Although field trials were not run, the team suggests possible advantages of rats over dogs: (1) rats can squeeze into tight hiding places; (2) rats do not form strong social bonds with humans and wouldn't need specific human handlers nearby; (3) rats are inexpensive to breed and maintain, and large numbers can be trained through automated systems; and sadly, (4) rats might be seen as expendable and could be called upon in dangerous situations involving the detection of explosives and buried mines. ("Training rats to search and alert on contraband odors," Applied Animal Behaviour Science 77:3, 2002)
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Stephan Reebs is a professor of biology at the Universite de Moncton in New Brunswick, Canada, and the author of Fish Behavior in the Aquarium and in the Wild (Cornell University Press).
COPYRIGHT 2002 Natural History Magazine, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2008 Gale, Cengage Learning
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