TNT no problem for bomb disposal elephant

Barcraft TV released a footage of a bomb disposal elephant

Chishuru, a 17-year-old African elephant is his own bomb disposal expert.

Trained in South Africa and funded by the U.S. Army, the elephant has a 97 percent success rate, and can detect even the smallest trace of explosives.

Using elephants like this began when researchers realized that a herd of elephants tracked by GPS in Angola were avoiding landmines left in fields during a civil war.

The researchers found that an elephant’s incredible trunk could detect even the smallest amount of TNT that had been dissolved in acetone on filter paper.

According to Ashadee Kay Miller, a zoology student at the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, the elephant detected 73 out of 74 TNT samples.

However, because putting an elephant into the field would be dangerous and impractical, researchers will use drones to collect scent samples from a suspected area and bring them to a trained elephant.