All in a day’s work for the lab in Ashland, Ore., that in just a year has gained a reputation as the Scotland Yard for animals. Poachers often go free because of the difficulty in proving the origin of a few feathers, say, or even a freezer full of steaks, so the lab is developing scientific identifcation procedures that stand up in court. Among them is an electron-microscope technique to differentiate fossil mammoth ivory–which is legal–from forbidden (and almost identical) elephant ivory. One of the most important projects is a simplified chromosome analysis for deer meat, to tell an illegal doe from a buck when it’s already been cut into steaks. Goddard hopes eventually to use DNA analysis to match a piece of meat in a freezer to the traces of blood or scraps of flesh left at the kill site–in the way that a trace of blood may trap a murderer. “There are thousands of species of animals,” he says, “and hundreds of forensics labs that investigate crimes against one-Homo sapiens. We handle all the rest.”
