Elephants To The Rescue

A possible "best use" for the Osprey:   Transporting

bomb sniffing elephants to your local airport. At least

 no troops would be killed when it falls out of the sky.

The pilots would just have to take their chances.

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JOHANNESBURG (AP) — Armed with a sharp sense of smell, dogs have a long history of detecting explosives for their human handlers. Trained rats sniff out land mines from old African wars. In Croatia, researchers have tried to train bees to identify TNT.

Now elephants. New research conducted in South Africa and involving the U.S. military shows they excel at identifying explosives by smell, stirring speculation about whether their extraordinary ability can save lives.

"They work it out very, very quickly," said Sean Hensman, co-owner of a game reserve where three elephants passed the smell tests by sniffing at buckets and getting a treat of marula, a tasty fruit, when they showed that they recognized samples of TNT, a common explosive, by raising a front leg.

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Riiiiight.

Next thing you know the military - and a host  of defense contractors - will want a few billion taxpayer dollars to design and build special transports for these bomb sniffing elephants. Cattle growers will want gobs of  money to raise herds of elephants for the military - it will be much more profitable than raising cattle - and politicians will vie for the privilege of putting the all new,  but prohibitively expense,  training centers in their respective States. Instead of these additional billions, let's use the Osprey!

Never forget the Osprey.. We have spent billions and billions of taxpayer dollars over three decades making this unstable and idiotic metal brick fly, a vehicle that is still not approved for general use in the military because of its lamentable safety record. The reason all that money was thrown into the bottomless pit of the military/industrial complex?

The Osprey is claimed to be about 20% faster than an ordinary helicopter, about 50 mph faster. It is supposed to be able to get our troops to some place where they weren't 20% faster, you know, like Benghazi.

Perhaps that 20% faster could be beneficial if the bomb the elephant needed to sniff out was a time bomb.

 - - - - -> sigh < - - - - -