Pet kangaroo detects cancer in Australian owner

A pet kangaroo has helped its Australian owner detect skin cancer by continually licking at sores, local media reported on Tuesday.

Owner Josephine Brennan-Kuss said Bella, her pet kangaroo, kept licking at her three sores for more than a month and all the attention made her go see a doctor.

"Whenever I was out in the yard ... Bella would lick them with so much fervour," she told the Adelaide Advertiser.

"I'd been meaning to get the sores checked but every time I went to the doctor, it was just to grab a script and I kept forgetting and I'd think 'oh well, next time' because they hadn' t been bothering me much."

Brennan-Kuss, 63, said she was grateful for Bella's help because the doctor's examination revealed the sores were skin cancers and she would have ignored them if her kangaroo had not been so persistent.

Studies show dogs have the ability to identify cancers because of their strong sense of smell and can detect a change in odour within the body.

Flinders University Centre for Innovation in Cancer Professor Graeme Young said besides dogs, he was not aware of any other animal trained to detect cancers.

But he did not rule out a kangaroo's ability to do the same.

"There are no other animals that have been trained to do it ( but) any animal that does have a powerful sense of smell could possibly be trained to do that," he said.