Animal magic
Landmine-detecting rats and drug-sniffing bees are just some of the creatures performing new niche jobs
Alamy
- Bill Borrows
The Animal Employment Agency is on Radio 4 at 3.30pm on Wednesday. Add it to your collection now
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“I think pandas are overrated,” says Simon Watt, author, comedian, evolutionary biologist and the man behind the Ugly Animal Preservation Society. “And I can say what I want because people who care about the panda are already on my team – they care [about conservation] and want to make a difference.”
Pandas only cropped up because we were discussing the collective nouns for animals (for pandas it’s an “embarrassment”). A “business” of ferrets features in Radio 4’s The Animal Employment Agency, in which Watt highlights certain niche jobs where only an animal will do. “Despite the technology, AI and robotics available today,” he says, “animals are still smashing it.”
Animals like Ronin, an African giant pouched rat, who was recognised by The Guinness Book of World Records last month after uncovering 109 landmines in Cambodia since 2021. Ronin was trained by Apopo, the same non-profit organisation in Tanzania as Jones, the HeroRat (as they’re known) encountered by Watt while recording the documentary. “Their sense of smell, trainability and extraordinary problem-solving intelligence, plus their size and ability to walk on landmines without triggering them, means they can significantly speed up operations,” he says. “Ethically, they are following their natural instincts, and they’re rewarded in both an emotional sense and with food as they build a relationship with their trainer.”
HeroRats are also more efficient than humans and can check an area the size of a tennis court in 30 minutes whereas a person with a metal detector might take four days. Ferrets, too, are “way better than humans or machines in their field of expertise”. Which is? “They go into walls and find a way out,” says Watt. “They can be sent down a pipe and, wearing little telemetry trackers, discover a blockage that means you don’t have to rip up 100m of the central business district.”
The National Ferret School in Derbyshire (yes, really) takes advantage of ferrets’ long, sinewy bodies and ultra-flexible spines when training them to lay fibre optic cable. But, despite having a higher number of olfactory receptor neurons than most animals, their application for “detection by smell” work is not a natural fit temperamentally – unlike, bizarrely, for bees.
Bees can learn to associate sugar with the scent of Semtex
“Bees have got incredible ‘classical conditioning,’” says Watt. “If you get a bee to associate sugar with a certain scent, it will do it at the second time of asking. It learns that quickly. The research is ongoing, but a device to capitalise on this would look a little like an old tape cassette case with the bees hooked up in a line and their heads peeking out, a bit like a stable of horses. Once they’re trained to associate sugar with a particular scent such as Semtex or cocaine, a proboscis will pop out when they smell it as if they’re going to have a lick of sugar and that will break a laser beam and tell you instantly. The fact that they associate so well means that there is no need for weeks of training, as is the case with dogs.”
Sniffer dogs have, of course, been hanging around airports for years, but Watt’s documentary extols their ability in another area. “Anecdotally, there have been stories for years about dogs licking at a human mole that turns out to be skin cancer, but we still don’t know how they know. The scent profile of somebody who’s got bladder cancer or bowel cancer can’t be run through a machine yet, so dogs are going to be superior here until we can work out how they do it.”
And it’s not just cancers. “We meet Lauren,” says Watt. “She has postural tachycardia syndrome (PoTS), which can mean she has seizures. Her dog is able to anticipate this and give her five minutes’ notice to make sure that she’s sitting somewhere safe. It has revolutionised her life.”
As well as finding mines, giant pouched rats can also detect disease in humans and, for example, can sniff out tuberculosis quicker than a lab can diagnose it using microscopy. But a dog “will actually learn your other habits and idiosyncrasies to keep you safe,” says Watt. “It will also provide companionship. Studies are beginning to show that if you cuddle a dog, your oxytocin, one of the happy chemicals, rises – but so does theirs and there is a desire as well as a capacity to actively help us. Plus, they’re the right size to follow you around, which you can’t say about a bee.” Or a rat or robot.
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“The other jobs that were historically undertaken by animals, such as transportation or pulling a plough, have been superseded by technology,” says Watt, “But these guys will be around doing their thing for years to come.”
Authors
Bill Borrows
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