Is the World Ready for Search and Rescue Otters?

Otters are pretty smart. They're quite cute, too. And you'll be surprised by this, but otters can smell underwater. How does an air breathing mammal do that? They manipulate the air bubbles in their noses and analyze them after the bubble has been exposed to water. When Michael Hadsel learned this fact, he went out and bought some otters. 

Hadsel has a search and rescue company. He's trained dogs for this work for years, but always wanted to find a way to locate bodies that were hidden in water. His work with the first two otters convinced him that they could do this work, and then he got a young orphaned otter pup he named Splash. Splash was trained from a young age, and is now the nation's first search and rescue otter. In his first professional search, he located a weapon that had been used in a murder 25 years earlier. Splash has since participated in 20 other recovery missions and has found four bodies. Read about Splash and his talents at Outside Online, or here if you are out of free articles. -via Metafilter