Drug-sniffing squirrels educated to hitch China’s Chongqing Police
Yin Jin, a police canine handler in Chongqing, China, assigned to coach the squirrel anti-narcotics squad, informed state media on Monday that the squirrels have accomplished an “excellent job” in drug detection workout routines thus far.
However, it should possible be some time but earlier than the squirrels are deployed to precise drug busts, Yin stated in an interview on Thursday.
News of the squirrel squad’s existence unfold shortly in China. One video posted by the People’s Daily, the official publication of the Chinese Communist Party, appeared to indicate the squirrels sniffing numerous surfaces and darting between obstacles throughout lab checks, and went viral on Weibo, the favored microblogging web site.
Yin, the police canine handler who is coaching the squirrels, informed the state-run outlet Chongqing Daily on Monday that coaching the squad was the end result of years of analysis.
“These squirrels have a rather keen sense of smell,” Yin stated, including that the rodents have been educated to point by scratching whether or not they had detected medicine on a floor.
Squirrels and different rodents are good at drug detection as a result of they’ve the power to cross by nooks and crannies in compact areas and to smell out medicine hidden inside tightly packaged parcels, Yin stated. More than 139 billion parcels have been collected and delivered in China in 2022, in keeping with the State Post Bureau, and authorities have reported latest instances the place medicine have been despatched through submit and masqueraded as tea or different authorized merchandise to keep away from detection and seizure.
Still, this squad was a primary as a result of it took the police years to be assured that they have been accurately coaching rodents for these sorts of operations. “Our techniques in training rodents was not mature enough before,” he stated.
Police plan to do extra real-world drills earlier than placing the squirrels on energetic responsibility. “It’s probably going to take some time,” Yin informed The Washington Post.
Some Weibo customers half-jokingly expressed “jealousy” towards the squirrels for his or her seemingly soft jobs as civil servants — a extremely regarded place in China, particularly amid an financial downturn. “These buddies are doing better than me,” wrote one girl who stated she had failed the aggressive civil servant examination final yr.
A hashtag concerning the squirrel squad was trending on Thursday and had been considered greater than 51 million occasions on Weibo as of Thursday afternoon native time.
China has strict anti-drug legal guidelines which might be knowledgeable by its expertise throughout the Opium Wars. In the mid-to-late-1800s, the ruling Qing dynasty’s makes an attempt to forestall principally British retailers from illegally importing opium into China sparked two conflicts during which China was pressured to cede territory to the British, and led to widespread drug use. When the Chinese Communist Party got here to energy in 1949, it led a profitable marketing campaign to crack down on the home opium market.
China’s Narcotics Control Commission stated in an announcement shared final yr by the Chinese Embassy to the United States that “over the past five years, China has endeavored to deepen the battle against drugs,” launching “special campaigns” to focus on the worldwide drug provide chain. The fee stated medicine circulating in China “were mainly from overseas.”
American authorities in recent times have additionally accused their Chinese counterparts of not doing sufficient to cease the circulation of gear used to fabricate fentanyl from their territory, and stated these substances usually find yourself within the United States within the type of fentanyl imported by Mexican drug cartels. A latest report written by the Congressional Research Service acknowledged that “cooperation on drug control issues has been severely strained since 2020,” when tensions between Washington and Beijing started to extend.
As a part of their home crackdown on medicine, Chinese authorities in 2018 launched the initiative to determine and practice new animals, together with rodents, to detect medicine.
Yin, who has been concerned within the challenge since its launch, informed the native Hechuan Daily, “Research like this requires innovativeness as well as the patience for a flower to bloom.”