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Some Animals Uniquely Suited To Perform Specific Tasks For Man
WASHINGTON - About 30
military installations in West
Germany belonging to the 32nd
U.S. Army Air Defense Command
are being guarded these days by
900 geese that will honk, hiss, and
flap their wings if they hear un
familiar noises.
Whoever thought that America’s
first line of defense against
terrorism would involve fowl play?
Actually, the geese are following
in a noble tradition. Throughout
the centuries, a variety of animals
have been used in a variety of ways
to benefit mankind other than by
providing the basics of food,
clothing, and companionship.
Among the predecessors of the
32nd’s watchgeese, in fact, is a
goose patrol that has been guard
ing a Scottish distillery since 1959.
Dumb Animals?
The ways in which animals aid
humans fall broadly into two
categories. In one category,
animals are taught to do
something specific; in the other,
animals simply do what comes
naturally. In either case, it isn’t
that animals are particularly
smart or generous, the experts
say.
“Animals have no special in
telligence,” says Edward Price, an
animal-science professor at the
University of California, Davis,
flying in the face of popular
wisdom. “Some animals just
happen to be uniquely suited to
special tasks.”
Price cites dogs trained to sniff
out all kinds of objects, from drugs
to guns to termites; and pigeons,
whose eyesight is so acute that
they have been used by many
nations in peace and war.
Marian Bailey, now the
president of Animal Behavior
Enterprises in Hot Springs, Ark.,
had a contract during the Vietnam
war to train pigeons to search out
camouflaged enemy soldiers.
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“We tested the idea with the
Special Forces at Fort Bragg,
N.C.,” Dr. Bailey says. “The
pigeons were trained to fly in front
of a convoy of troops. If they found
a camouflaged soldier, they would
land near him, and a radio signal
would be sent back to the convoy.
The pigeons were fine, but the
system was never actually used;
there was a problem with the
transmitter.”
Dr. Bailey, an animal
psychologist, first got involved in
the use of animals in warfare with
pigeons. While studying at the
University of Minnesota, she
worked with famed psychologist
B.F. Skinner in training pigeons to
pinpoint bombing sites. That
project, too, was pigeonholed, so to
speak, but for Dr. Bailey the ex
perience was valuable.
“We realized how good the
theory was: you could train all
sorts of animals to do things that
animals had not been previously
trained to do,” she says.
Responding To
Signals
The theory she refers to is
Skinner’s concept of using operant
conditioning techniques to bring
about behavior modification. In
plain English, that means training
an animal to do what you want it to
do in response to a signal.
Using these techniques, Bailey
and others have trained pigeons
and herring gulls to search for
sailors lost at sea; put other
pigeons to work inspecting drug
capsules for defects; enlisted a
Navy sea lion to retrieve objects
stranded on the ocean floor; used a
chimpanzee as a nurse/recep
tionist at a veterinary clinic in
Japan; and drafted gerbils for
drug-detection duty at Canadian
airports. Public ridicule scrapped
the gerbil idea before it went into
operation.
There was a spate of mysterious
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Sidney, an eager beagle, makes himself useful to Bob O'Malley, a termite inspector in
Flushing, N.Y. Sidney pinpoints the exact site of termite infestation by leaving scratch
marks where he sniffs the critters out. His valuable nose was trained by a Belmont,
Calif., company and was leased, along with the rest of Sidney, by the Flushing firm. He
can find termites in walls and floors whether their presence is known or merely
suspected.
reports during the Vietnam War
about porpoises used to guard
against underwater attacks by
Viet Cong frogmen in Cam Ranh
Bay. The porpoises supposedly had
switchblade knives attached to
their snouts, and reportedly killed
several wet and wildly surprised
guerrillas.
But there arS those Marian
Bailey, for one who suspect that
such reports were part of an
American disinformation cam
paign designed to discourage
enemy attacks.
In the second category of
animals the ones that just follow
their instincts exhibit A is the
sudden trendiness of the llama, a
beast of burden whose innate
qualities are making it in
creasingly popular as a pack
animal among workers and out
doorsmen in die mountains of the
American West.
“They’re versatile animals,”
says James Hook, manager of
Great Divide Llamas of Loveland,
Colo. “They have sure footing,
they’re agile, they can carry 80 to
100 pounds of gear, they’re real
intelligent, and they have a sweet
disposition. You also get urbanites
who are intimidated by the size of a
-7
horse or a mule, but a llama only
weighs about 300 pounds.
“They don’t disturb the
vegetation much, because they
have soft feet, and they have a low
impact on pastures because they
spread their grazing out. And there
are wool and meat as end
products.”
The llama doesn’t have to be
trained much; it just has to do a lot
of what a llama would do anyway.
In this way, it is like the military
watchgeese, the de-scented skunk
(Turn to Page B 12)
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