Tuskers trained in study to sniff out explosives

JOHANNESBURG: Armed with a sharp sense of smell, dogs have a long history of detecting explosives for their human handlers. Trained rats sniff out landmines from old African wars. In Croatia, researchers have tried to train bees to identify TNT.

Now elephants. New research conducted in South Africa and involving the US military shows they excel at identifying explosives by smell, stirring speculation about whether their extraordinary ability can save lives.

“They work it out very, very quickly,” said Sean Hensman, coowner of a game reserve where three elephants passed the smell tests by sniffing at buckets and getting a treat of marula, a tasty fruit, when they showed they recognised samples of TNT, a common explosive, by raising a front leg.

Another plus: elephants remember their training longer than dogs, said Stephen Lee, head scientist at the US Army Research Office, a major funder.

The research comes as elephant populations across Africa are threatened. Poachers have annually killed tens of thousands of elephants for their tusks in recent years because of a surge in demand for ivory in Asia, primarily China.

A pachyderm’s potential prowess in detecting explosives was noticed in Angola, to which many elephants had returned after a 2002 peace deal ended a protracted war that saw the animals being slaughtered. While there was peace, the land remained sown with mine fields. Some elephants seemed to intentionally avoid them, though it might not have been a scent that kept them away – they could instead have associated those areas with danger because elephants had died there in the past.

Researchers were inspired to find out what was going on. –