Rusik

In 2003, officers at a police checkpoint in Stavropol Krai, southern Russia, took in a stray kitten they named Rusik. The region sits on a smuggling route for illegally-caught sturgeon from the Caspian Sea — a trade in caviar and fish worth a great deal of money — and searching vehicles for hidden catches was slow, difficult work.

Rusik solved it. The kitten had an obvious and entirely self-taught interest in fish, and officers noticed that he could pick out concealed sturgeon in a loaded vehicle far faster than a person could search it. He was pressed into service, and by the accounts of the officers who worked with him he was extraordinarily good — locating catches hidden under tarpaulins and among other cargo with a reliability no sniffer dog at the post could match.

His career was short. Later that year Rusik was killed, struck by a car that police believed belonged to smugglers he had previously caught, and officers at the post treated it as a deliberate act. The story was picked up by news agencies worldwide, and Rusik became briefly and posthumously famous as the sniffer cat who was too effective for his own good.

Cats are almost never used in detection work — they lack the trainability and the biddable temperament that make dogs suited to it, and they work when they feel like working. Rusik is the exception that proves the rule: a cat who happened to be motivated by exactly the thing his colleagues needed to find.