Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
down,” and “That thing doesn't belong here, but it's not the thing I'm looking for.” Although
dogs aren't perfect, they adapt to a variety of search conditions.
Nonetheless, challenges to the cadaver dog's primacy are constant. Perhaps it wouldn't be
a machine but a bird that would do the trick? No researcher ever wants to give up on the
possibility that other species are better at scent detection than dogs. That's why I was worried
when I first heard about the turkey vulture experiments in Germany. Although the studies
are limited, turkey vultures appear to have the most advanced sense of smell of any raptor.
The idea to use them to find human bodies was ingenious. A search dog with wings and a
better nose. The Hanover, Germany, police commissioner, Rainer Herrmann, told fascinated
reporters that vultures, with their ability to fly high and cover kilometers of forest, might have
a major advantage over sniffer dogs. More than forty agencies from Switzerland, Austria, and
Germany expressed interest.
It wasn't the first time people had thought about using vultures as sniffer animals. As early
as the 1930s, the famous ornithologist Kenneth Stager reported, oil industry engineers in
Texas had added ethyl mercaptan—a chemical that smells like carrion—to pipelines, then
watched turkey vultures to see where the leaks were.
For this twenty-first-century version of search vultures, a few small hurdles had to be over-
come: The vultures needed to be properly trained, equipped with GPS locators, encouraged
to find only dead people, not dead animals—and convinced not to swallow the victim and
destroy evidence before the police arrived. Vulture trainer German Alonso told reporters that
police probably could arrive in their cruisers before too much important information went
down the vultures' gullets, as the birds tend to peck rather than devour. I studied the pho-
tos of Alonso with his search vulture in training, Sherlock, perched on his arm. Though I
was a sucker for a good-looking German shepherd, I figured I could get over the bird's bald,
wrinkled red head and huge Roman beak. Solo has a Roman nose. But I couldn't help think-
ing about how vultures like to throw up corrosive vomit and how they pee down their own
legs to keep bacteria at bay.
Sherlock didn't like to fly when he was searching for his training material. Instead, he
waddled around like a duck. He was so anxious and antisocial, Alonso said, that given the
command to search, he would hide in the woods or bolt. Miss Marple and Columbo, two
younger vultures brought in to assist Sherlock and make him feel as though he were part of
a big vulture family, fought constantly. None of the vultures seemed to give a fig about the
difference between animal carcasses and human cadaver.
The Social Democratic Party—the opposition party—suggested that the state government
start an international training center for search vultures. By the time the laughter faded, so
had the project. “The vultures are not currently available to journalists,” bird spokesman Ste-
fan Freundlieb told
Der Spiegel
reporter Michael Fröhlingsdorf.
