There was also the problem of Miss Marple, Columbo and Sherlock shitting all over the training staff and the police facilities. It’s just as well that the birds didn’t work out because they would have probably eaten half the evidence by the time their handlers arrived at the scene.
BIRD-BRAINED SCHEME TO REPLACE SNIFFER DOGS WITH VULTURES IS SCRAPPED
Miss Marple and Columbo fight constantly, while Sherlock refuses to fly, preferring to walk in circles
Mail Online
July 1, 2011
Police chiefs are set to scrap a plan to replace vultures with sniffer dogs after it turned out to be a miserable failure.
The German authorities imported the feathered recruits from Carinthia, Austria, after hearing of their incredible eyesight and fantastic sense of smell.
It was hoped these attributes, coupled with the birds' ability to find dead prey would help them to find dead bodies.
But the three birds - named Sherlock, Miss Marple and Columbo - have not only failed to ever find a single cadaver laid out in the wild for them - but one of the vultures has consistently refused to fly at all.
Instead Sherlock walks around at the speed similar to a waddling duck making him far less efficient than the average sniffer dog.
In addition to this, the other two birds - Miss Marple and Columbo - spend all of their time fighting.
An insider working with the project at Walsrode in Lower Saxony, Germany, confirmed: 'The project has been a disaster.'
Early trials with the birds - which have a five foot wingspan - had already ruffled feathers with fans of more traditional methods.
'Everyone knows what vultures do when they find a body and they're not going to be as easy to call off as a Labrador. You could find half the evidence disappearing down their beaks,' said one.
When contacted this week for a comment, project creator Hermann Meyer said that the vultures were 'not currently available for journalists.'
Trainer German Alonso admitted: 'They don't seem to be able to do anything other than attack each other.'
And he revealed further research had been done on the birds which indicated they might not have been the best choice.
He said: 'It seems they are rather cowardly birds - they would rather hide in the woods than be out and about in the open.'
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