Police sniffer vultures plan a 'disaster'

Police chiefs are to scrap a plan to use vultures to replace sniffer dogs after it turned out to be a miserable failure.

Police in Germany imported the birds from Carinthia, Austria, in the hope their amazing eyesight, fantastic sense of smell and ability to find dead prey would help them to find missing bodies.



But the three birds - named Sherlock, Miss Marples and Columbo - have failed to find a single cadaver laid out in the wild for them - unless put in front of their beaks. And one refuses to fly at all. Sherlock walks around at a speed similar to a waddling duck making him far less efficient than the average sniffer dog.

In addition the other two birds - Miss Marple and Columbo - spend most of their time fighting. An insider working with the project at Walsrode in Lower Saxony, Germany, confirmed: "The project has been a disaster."