Police in northern Germany are training vultures to seek out dead bodies. Appropriately, the three vultures are named Sherlock, Miss Marple, and Columbo. From the BBC:
Police used a piece of shroud from a mortuary for the training exercise, German media report.
The vultures are thought to be better than sniffer dogs at finding bodies when a large area has to be searched and the terrain is difficult, for example if it is densely overgrown.
But the experiment raises ethical concerns because of the risk that a vulture could start pecking at a dead body, the Berliner Morgenpost newspaper says.
“German police train vulture ‘detectives’ to find bodies”