The newest prospective members of an anti-drug police squad are discreet, quick and agile. Once they’re fully trained, they could be deployed to large, complex sites, such as logistics warehouses, to uncover drugs that may be hidden there.
These are not elite narcotics officers. They are squirrels.
This week, a police unit in south-western China said it had trained the six Eurasian red squirrels to sniff out drugs as part of this national initiative.
Yin Jin, a police dog handler in Chongqing assigned to train the squirrel anti-narcotics squad, told state media this week that the squirrels had done an “excellent job” in drug-detection exercises so far.
However, it will probably be a while yet before the squirrels are deployed to actual drug busts, Yin said in an interview today.
News of the squirrel squad’s existence spread quickly in China. One video posted by the People's Daily, the official publication of the Chinese Communist Party, appeared to show the squirrels sniffing various surfaces and darting between obstacles during lab tests. It went viral on Weibo, the popular microblogging site.
Yin told the state-run outlet, Chongqing Daily, on Monday that training the squad was the culmination of years of research.
“These squirrels have a rather keen sense of smell,” Yin said, adding that the rodents were trained to indicate through scratching whether they had detected drugs on a surface.
Squirrels and other rodents are good at drug detection because they have the ability to pass through nooks and crannies in compact spaces and to sniff out drugs hidden inside tightly packaged parcels, Yin said.
This squad was a first because it took the police years to be confident that they were correctly training rodents for these kinds of operations. “Our techniques in training rodents were not mature enough before,” Yin said.
Police plan to do more real-world drills before putting the squirrels on active duty. “It’s probably going to take some time,” said Yin.
Some Weibo users half-jokingly expressed “jealousy” toward the squirrels for their seemingly cushy jobs as civil servants ‒ a highly regarded position in China. “These buddies are doing better than me,” wrote one woman who said she had failed the competitive civil servant examination last year.
In 2018, Chinese authorities launched the initiative to identify and train new animals, including rodents, to detect drugs.
Yin, who has been involved in the project since its launch, told the local Hechuan Daily: “Research like this requires innovativeness as well as the patience for a flower to bloom.” - The Washington Post
The Independent on Saturday