Photo Gallery Police Rats
Rats may not be everyone's favorite animal, but they have great potential in law enforcement. Dutch police are training an elite group of sewer rats in Rotterdam to sniff out drugs, gunpowder or traces of other substances that cling to someone after they've committed a crime.
The rats have an average success rate of 95 percent, says trainer Monique Hamerslag, which would be good stats for a dog.
Rats have 1,000 different receptors that are crucial to the perception of smells -- more than dogs, which have 900. But the rats cannot replace police dogs, which are better suited for use at crime scenes. Still, Hamerslag says, they can make police investigations cheaper and more efficient.
The idea for the police rats came about two years ago, when Hamerslag wrote her thesis at the police academy on animals used at crime scenes and in investigations. She noted that rats were already being trained in Africa to search for land mines, and questioned whether they could be used to detect other substances as well.
The most accurate of the rats, Derrick, is named after the eponymous TV series about a detective in Munich. The series, which starred Horst Tappert (left) as Stephan Derrick and Fritz Wepper as sidekick Harry Klein, enjoyed long-lasting popularity in the Netherlands.
