1 September 2025
Many animals work for people together with sniffer canines who use their sense of scent to detect explosives and unlawful medicine. Landmine fields make land unusable in lots of components of the world and may be too harmful for canines to work in as a result of their weight can set off the explosives. The APOPO group in Tanzania has the reply: Southern big pouched rats.
Native to southern Africa, the southern big pouched rat (Cricetomys ansorgei) weighs 2.6-4.4 kilos and is 28-31 inches from nostril to tail tip. That is giant for a rat however light-weight in comparison with a sniffer canine. Although he can’t see nicely he has a superb sense of scent and is kind of trainable. All he wants is a banana reward to maintain on sniffing. Generally he gobbles it up and shops it within the very giant cheek pouches that gave him his identify.
Referred to as HeroRATs by APOPO: “A HeroRAT can search an space the scale of a tennis court docket in half-hour – a human deminer with a steel detector can take as much as 4 days.”
Cambodia has one of many highest landmine concentrations on this planet left over from the Vietnam Conflict, their civil conflict, the Khmer Rouge, and persevering with civil strife. These movies inform the story of HeroRATs in Cambodia.
The HeroRAT “mine sweeps” by operating transects throughout the suspect space. When he detects a landmine, he evenly scratches the bottom above it to sign to his handler that he’s discovered one thing. (No landmines on this video.)
HeroRATs have additionally been taught to detect tuberculosis in sputum (100 samples in 20 minutes as an alternative of 4 days) and poached animal components in unlawful wildlife trafficking.
Only in the near past a workforce of HeroRATs skilled to search out people trapped beneath earthquake rubble has been stationed in Turkey.
Learn extra at APOPO: We Practice Rats to Save Lives.
p.s. The acronym APOPO comes from Dutch: Anti-Persoonsmijnen Ontmijnende Product Ontwikkeling = Anti-Personnel Landmines Detection Product Growth
