CRAIG NELSON
SPECIAL TO THE STAR
KIBBUTZ LAHAV, Israel- Israel boasts of giving the world many great inventions, including drip irrigation, the Uzi submachine gun and the "electrical hand-held leg-hair removing device," otherwise known as the Epilady.
Now come bomb-sniffing pigs.
If Geva Zin, 26, has his way, a creature that is largely taboo in Israel will be its next gift to the world. At this collective farm in southern Israel, Zin is training pigs to sniff out land mines and the other discarded garbage of modern warfare that maim and kill long after the guns have fallen silent.
"The pigs are for Angola and Mozambique. We're going to use them for humanitarian missions ... We're training them, not for food, but to save lives."
During a stint in the Israeli army in the late 1990s, Zin trained dogs to detect land mines. Last year, he travelled to Croatia to train dogs to detect mines in that battle-scarred Balkan nation. It was there, where pigs flourish like sheep in the Middle East, he had a revelation about a new use for the pig's powerfully probing proboscis.
Back in Israel, he approached the Institute for Animal Research at Lahav with the idea of training boars to sniff out explosives. The institute approved.
"There's no doubt. Look at their noses! God designed them to go into the field and find mines."
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