The US government will fund the training of a team of giant rats to combat illegal wildlife trafficking in Africa.

An elite group of African giant pouched rats will be used at ports, initially in Tanzania, to detect illegal shipments of pangolins – the world’s most trafficked animal, which has been pushed towards extinction due to the trade in its scales and skins – as well as hardwood timber.

The US Fish & Wildlife Service is spending $100,000 on a pilot project that will train rats to detect the illegal items and learn to communicate this to their human handlers. The rats, which can grow up to 3ft long, have poor eyesight but an excellent sense of smell. They have pouched cheeks, much like a hamster, which give the species its name.

African giant pouched rats have previously been attached to leashes and used to detect mines and tuberculosis. Bart Weetjens, a Belgian rat enthusiast, started a project that has trained and accredited rats that have found 1,500 buried landmines in Africa and south-east Asia. More than 5,000 TB patients have also been identified by the rats.

The Fish & Wildlife Service said it hoped that the foray into the investigation of wildlife smuggling would be the first stage of a “much larger project to mainstream rats as an innovative tool in combating illegal wildlife trade”.

The Obama administration has recently escalated its crackdown on the hunting and trafficking of imperiled African wildlife. Last week, the Fish & Wildlife Service announced a ban on the import of all “trophies” – such as heads, paws and tails – taken by American hunters from captive-bred lions in Africa.

The money for rat training is part of a larger $1.2m package that will provide funding for law enforcement in Cambodia, forest patrols to reduce tiger poaching in Indonesia and sniffer dogs to unearth illegal shipments of saiga antelope horn.

“These grants provide much-needed resources to support projects on the ground where wildlife trafficking is decimating some of the Earth’s most cherished and most unusual species,” said Dan Ashe, director of the Fish & Wildlife Service.

“These grant recipients are using pioneering approaches to address the illegal wildlife trade in the places where it starts and where demand for wildlife products feeds the criminal supply chain of illegal goods.”