Drug smugglers at Canadian prisons and airports were becoming a problem. The authorities considered training dogs to sniff out the drugs as the prisoners or passengers walked by.
But dogs bite, eat a lot and require a lot of handling. Too expensive.
Someone remembered that gerbils, the small furry rodents, had very sensitive noses. So why not train them to react to a whiff of cocaine from a passerby by pushing a warning-light button, then place them in airport and prison entranceways where they could alert guards to the presence of a drug-carrier? Not too expensive.
The Canadian Ministry of Corrective Services commissioned a University of Toronto zoologist to train some gerbils for a pilot project. He soon had a team of eight of the rodents ready for action. When they smelled narcotics they pushed a button that flashed a nearby red light and were rewarded with food.
But before the pilot project could be put into operation at a correctional institution in Ontario, the news organizations heard of it and had a field day. Headlines like ''Mounties Outmaneuvered by Gerbils!'' appeared over stories deriding the project.
Adding injury to insult, the gerbils were accidentally given contaminated drinking water and died. The Corrective Services Ministry has not abandoned the experiment, but next time plans to proceed under stricter supervision and in utter secrecy.Continue reading the main story