South Africa trains elephants to take up jobs of sniffer dogs

#snifferdogs #explosives #poachers #africanelephants South Africa is breaking new ground by training elephants to take over jobs of sniffer dogs by making use of their super-strength sense of smell to sniff out explosives and poachers as reported in dailymail.co.uk dated 25 February 2015.
The project is supported by the U.S. Army Research Office who have been inspired after watching elephants in Angola using their trunks to help avoid areas full of land mines that had been left over from decades of civil war.
As explained by Sean Hensman, operator of Adventures with Elephants game ranch in South Africa, the nose of an elephant has amazing properties – this becomes all the more apparent when we imagine mammoths that had to find food through the ice.
During tests conducted by the U.S. Army Research Office, a 17-year-old male elephant was walked past a row of buckets- one of which would have a swab laced with TNT scent stapled to the bottom. The elephant had to insert his trunk into each bucket and, he was taught to stop and raise a front leg when he came across the one with the swab.
After some tries, he managed to get the bucket right every time and he was rewarded like a sniffer dog – his reward was the marula fruit.