Wildlife officials in Tanzania are training African giant pouched rats to help identify illegal shipments of pangolins, a heavily trafficked endangered species.
Funded through the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) as an effort to end wildlife trafficking, this program is currently assessing the rats’ ability to sniff out pangolins in various settings. If the rats are successful, they will eventually work in shipping ports to locate pangolins that have been illegally captured and locked up in shipping containers.
An extremely vulnerable species
Pangolins are an endangered species and the most illegally trafficked mammal on the planet. Their scales are ground up for use in traditional Chinese “medicine” and their meat is considered to be a high-end delicacy and status symbol in some areas of Asia.
Though these docile animals are protected by an international trade ban, their populations continue to plummet as poachers relentlessly capture them for the black market.
The only strategy pangolins have to protect themselves is to curl up into a ball and expose their tough outer scales. This helps with their natural predators but makes them an extremely easy target for poachers who can simply pick them up and walk off with them.
That’s where the rats come in. The goal for these surprisingly intelligent rodents is to locate pangolins packed away in hidden shipping containers before they’re sent off to be sold to the Asian black market.
While dogs usually come to mind for this sort of work, rats are less expensive to train and care for, and easier to transport. Officials believe that these enormous three-foot-long rats are perfect for the job as they’ve been so successful in other similar endeavors. This species is also used to sniff out landmines in Cambodia and test tuberculosis samples in Mozambique!
Watch as these rats are trained to identify landmines:
