Goodbye to rescue dogs: This African country is training rats to save lives
These rodents possess a highly developed sense of smell which makes them super trackers when it comes to sniffing out explosives or disease.
On the face of it, clearing landmines, cluster bombs, unexploded ordnance and other explosives is pretty much a thankless task - and perhaps the job with the highest risk of instant, violent death when something goes wrong.
A number of African countries have spent decades trying to rid their lands of millions of factory-produced landmines laid in the late 20th century which remain active - plus the countless homemade improvised explosive devices (IED).
African counties with the most mine clearance programs
The most affected nations include: Angola, Cambodia, Chad, Egypt, Ethiopia, Somalia, Yemen and Zimbabwe.
In 2023, 5,757 casualties were reported from landmines and ERW, with 3,331 injuries and 2,426 deaths - most of them, civilians.
Land and anti-personal mines were banned by 160 countries under the 1997 Landmine Ottawa Ban Convention. Tanzania, who destroyed their stockpile of mines in four phases after signing the convention in 1997, is now helping its neighbors to detect and destroy their UXBs buried on their terrain.
APOPO, a Tanzania-based nongovernmental organization have a team of specially- trained rats whose job is to sniff out mines in affected areas.
Light and with a keen sense of smell
With their highly developed sense of smell, these whiskered wonders are perfect for the job. Not only are they quick to detect explosives, they are light enough not to trigger the devices. Most of the rats trained by APOPO weigh little more than a kilogram and can cover large mined areas in half a hour. It would take a human armed with a metal detector between one and four days to complete the same task.
“Their sense of smell is incredible,” APOPO’s Fabrizio Dell’Anna told the Associated Press. “These rats are able to detect explosives, tuberculosis — even tiny amounts of the bacteria — and in this project, they are able to correctly identify and indicate humans.”
APOPO’s bomb-detecting rats have been making the world a safer place since 2003 and some are trained for other missions such as rooting out trafficked wildlife and finding trapped earthquake survivors.
Rats who can detect TB
These smart rodents also put their keen olfactory skills in action to detect illnesses such as tuberculosis. It would be impossible to calculate how many thousands of lives APOPO‘s HeroRATs have saved and will continue to save in the future.
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