Choose the correct letter, A, B or C. Quarantine at Australia’s international airports and seaports The main aim of the service

We live in an age of travel and a country of travellers. Australians love to travel overseas and there are also millions of overseas tourists visiting Australia each year. This means a huge task for Quarantine. Here are just some of the quarantine tasks that happen at international passenger terminals around Australia each day. To begin with, incoming luggage is X-rayed to check for quarantine risk items. Then passengers who may have these items are interviewed. In addition, we have detector dogs sniff luggage from high-risk flights and passenger ships.
The main purpose for performing the quarantine tasks is to educate about the importance of quarantine. People will not be fined or punished, but any items that pose a potential risk to Australia’s plants, animals or people need to be inspected and possibly treated to make them safe - or destroyed if the risk is too high. A total of 414 people work at the Quarantine and Inspection Section at the Sydney airport at the moment. They are kept busy every day by the quarantine tasks mentioned above and the assistance of sniff dogs does make their lives easier. Beagles were chosen as the most suitable breed for the ’friendly’ image of detector dogs working around the public at international airports. Beagles have an extraordinary sense of smell - said to be at least 100 times more acute than our own. They’re relatively small dogs and are co-operative and gentle with people. They can remain calm even when surrounded by the commotion of baggage collection areas, which is the main reason why they’ve been chosen for the programme. The beagles are trained to simply sit when they detect a target odour, and await their food reward from their handler. This is the kind of passive response regarded as acceptable around passengers.