(ORDO NEWS) — Pets often become eyewitnesses of crimes, and now they can act as reliable witnesses of the presence of a person in the house.
To collect their “testimony”, the police will need a cotton swab, a test tube and a small analysis in the laboratory.
In the popular computer game The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, players who decide to break local laws and steal a sweet roll from someone else’s house may encounter a funny situation when a chicken roaming nearby becomes a witness who later turned them in to city guards.
It sounds absurd, but it’s not that far from reality, where cats and dogs will soon be reliable witnesses to crime.
The fact is that our pets, being at home, constantly collect samples of human DNA on their wool.
Prior to this, researchers did not pay attention to whether such samples were good enough to identify a person and, for example, accurately answer the question of whether a certain “Mr. X” was in the victim’s house before the crime was committed.
Now, researchers at the Flinder College of Science and Engineering in Australia, in collaboration with the Victorian Police Department of Forensic Science , have decided to answer that question by collecting human DNA samples from the fur of 20 cats from different homes.
The results of DNA analysis showed that cats from which a small swab of wool was taken can indeed be “attracted” as witnesses to the presence of a person in the house.
80 percent of the DNA samples contained enough DNA to detect it, and in 70 percent the researchers were able to determine the genetic material for a specific person.
Thus, thanks to the cat’s hair, investigators will be able to associate the presence of a certain person with the house where the cat lives.
The findings could serve not only prosecutors, but lawyers as well: now that pets are known to carry human DNA on themselves, its presence at a crime scene where a cat lives nearby may just be an accident, and stronger evidence will be needed to be sure. establishing guilt.
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