“Wildlife is considered a low-risk commodity,” says Crawford Allan, vice president of wildlife crime and policy advocacy at WWF USA, who has more than 30 years of experience in wildlife crime. “Unfortunately, organized crime knows there is a real weakness in the methods of detecting ports, seaports and airports, particularly in Africa.”

Traffickers disguise wildlife products in a multitude of ways, he explains. Ivory, for example, can be stained to look like wood, hidden in harvest shipments and even cut into chocolate bar-shaped pieces, covered in chocolate and wrapped in packaging – all in an attempt to bypass visual inspections and with X-rays.

This is where rats and their keen sense of smell come into play. right new research led by APOPO and published in Frontiers in Conservation Science, rats were successfully trained in a research facility to sniff elephant tusks, rhinoceros horns, pangolin scales and African black wood – which Allan, who is not involved in the research, says there are some of them. the most common wildlife products to be trafficked from Africa.

Dr. Izzy Szott, the behavioral researcher leading the project, suggests using rats as a “complementary tool” to dogs, which are already used to detect wildlife smuggling. “Dogs are wonderful. If you’re looking at tracking through the Serengeti (a national park in Tanzania), you’re not going to use a rat for that,” she says. However, being “very small and nimble,” rats have the upper hand in a dense shipping container, she explains.

Unlike dogs, rats are happy to work with multiple handlers and, largely due to their smaller size, are much cheaper to train, maintain and transport, says Szott. This is particularly important given that much of the illegal wildlife trade originates in some of the world’s poorest regions.

Allan identifies cost as the major issue in detecting trafficked wildlife, saying “we need to find some cheaper and more sustainable solutions for detection in Africa”. He adds that improving detection methods increases the risk to illegal wildlife traders – which in turn increases trade prices and lowers demand. “I’m hoping that (using rats) for wildlife detection will be a low-cost, low-impact, low-footprint operation,” Allan says.

Kate Webb, an assistant professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at Duke University in North Carolina and one of the study’s lead authors, tells CNN that one of the biggest advantages of using rats is their relatively short training time. “There has also been interest in wildlife detection rats from Singapore and France,” she added.

Testing these research findings in the real world, APOPO last year conducted a proof-of-concept study in Tanzania’s Dar es Salaam seaport, dealing 95% of the country’s international trade. APOPO says the rats found the fish 83% of planted targets, even when the items were hidden by regularly used scent masking products. Once a rat spots a target, it alerts its handler by using its front paws to shoot a small ball attached to a custom-made neoprene vest that sets off a sound.

Illegal wildlife trade does not only affect the populations of trafficked animals or plants, but can have devastating consequences for entire ecosystems. Studies suggest that consumption of illegally traded wildlife can also lead to the spread of zoonotic diseases such as Ebola virus, monkeypox virus and severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS).

Giant African rats have an average lifespan of about eight years, so training them for a year is a worthwhile long-term investment, Szott says. The year consists of training sessions from Monday to Friday, regularly interspersed with playtime in a large outdoor kennel filled with rope toys and running wheels.

Rats’ high level of intelligence and curiosity make them good students, she explains: “If you need to get them to do something new, you just throw them in there (in a training enclosure) and wait for them to- and realize. ”

Like people, each rat has a different character, she adds: “You have animals that might get it on the first try, and you might have animals that take a little time, but then become absolute superstars once they figure it out.”

Although this research is still in its early stages, APOPO hopes it will expand in a similar way to its previous projects. The team plans to conduct further operational tests with the trained rats at the port and airport in Dar es Salaam. Next steps will focus on optimizing deployment strategies — looking at the rats’ performance when on long tracks versus free roaming, Szott says.

She’s sure the rats are up to the challenge. “So far, whatever we’ve thrown at the rats, they’ve done it,” she says. “If we communicate correctly to the rats, they have always risen to the occasion.”

Chris Lau contributed to this report.