‘HERO RATS’ SNIFFING OUT LANDMINES, SAVING LIVES IN CAMBODIA.
CUNNING RATS SNIFF OUT CAMBODIA’S LANDMINES
It’s been a busy morning for Cletus, Meynard, Victoria and others of their furry band. Tiny noses and long whiskers twitching, they’ve scurried and sniffed their way across 775 square metres of fields to eliminate a scourge that has killed thousands of Cambodians: landmines.
Meet the hero rats: intelligent, surprisingly adorable creatures with some of the most sensitive noses in the animal kingdom. Sent from Africa, where they successfully cleared minefields in Mozambique and Angola, they began the same task in northwestern Cambodia early this month and have already scored tangible results.
Two hectares have been declared mine-free around this village where more than 15 people have been killed or wounded by the explosives, forcing some to abandon their homes and rice fields and seek jobs elsewhere.
One villager, Khun Mao, says the rats have been sniffing for suspected mines in a rice field he has been afraid to cultivate for years. He says that while it is too soon to say whether the rodents can remove every mine, “To me, these rats are wonderful.”
“The villagers have started to get excited about farming their land again. You can see the light in their faces,” says Paul McCarthy, Cambodia program manager for the Belgian non- profit organization APOPO, or Anti- Personnel Land Mines Detection Product in English.
On a recent morning, the African giant pouched rats were working two suspected, taped- off minefields. Each rodent wore a harness connected to a rope strung out in a straight line between two handlers standing about five metres apart and outside the danger zone. The rodents then darted from one handler to the other, constantly sniffing the ground and taking time out only to scrub their bodies with tiny front paws or to answer nature’s call. The handlers moved a step or two down the field to repeat the process, and a second rat was later sent over the same terrain to double-check.
Two- year- old Victoria proved particularly swift — “very active,” one team member called her. She stars in APOPO’s “adopt- a- rat” fundraising drive.
At the second field, Merry and Meynard were completing three hours of effort as a midday sun beat down on the parched earth. The duo had earlier nosed in on an explosive, halting just above it and scratching the ground — the learned response when a rodent detects TNT inside a landmine. A deminer with a detector followed and the mine was dug up and detonated.
Unlike standard mine detectors, the super-sniffers pick up only TNT and not other metal objects. And unlike wage- earning humans, the rats work for peanuts — and their other favourite, bananas.
Theap Bunthourn, operations coordinator for the 34-member team, cited other advantages of using rats: They are cheaper to acquire and train than mine- sniffing dogs and easier to transport. Rats, averaging one kilogram, are also too light to detonate a pressure-activated mine. Dogs avoid that danger by staying a metre or so away from the explosives they detect.
Each rat can clear an area of 200 square metres in 20 minutes, something a technician with a mine detector would take one to four days to complete. Their sense of smell is so keen that in Africa they are also used to detect tuberculosis in human sputum samples at a rate much faster than the standard laboratory method.
McCarthy noted there is some skepticism about the rat mine sniffers, but “as we accumulate more data, the more we break down the skepticism.”
APOPO was founded in 1997 by Belgian Bart Weetjens, who bred rats, hamsters and other rodents as a boy and developed the idea of using rats to find mines while at university.
Even Mark Shukuru was skeptical when he joined APOPO in 2001 at the group’s headquarters in Tanzania. “At first I thought: ‘ Rats finding mines? It’s impossible.’ But they proved they could do it,” he said, noting that in Mozambique they cleared more than 13,000 mines without a single injury, to humans or rats.
Shukuru shepherded the Tanzanian-born rats to Cambodia, one of the world’s most heavily landmined countries, with up to six million mines or pieces of unexploded ordnance still left in the ground from decades of war. The mines at Trach were laid in the 1980s by Khmer Rouge guerrillas fighting the Vietnamese army.
Countrywide, about 67,000 people have been killed or injured since 1979. With more than 25,000 amputees, Cambodia has highest ratio of mine amputees per capita in the world, according to demining organizations. A mine accident occurs every 2 1/2 days on average.
Before going into the field, rat recruits are tested: One missed mine, and they don’t graduate to hero rats, registered as the trademark HeroRATs.
They usually work six days a week and are somewhat pampered when off- duty, sleeping indoors in roomy individual cages on wood shingles.
On weekends there’s a special feast of apples, potatoes, watermelon and carrots. But what really drives their mine- sniffing are bananas and peanuts.
After the morning session, Victoria, Cletus and the others rested in portable cages near the minefields while handlers offered them bananas, which they grabbed and greedily devoured. Grateful villagers gathered around the cages.
“It’s not often you hear people say that they love rats,” McCarthy said.
‘IT’S NOT OFTEN YOU HEAR PEOPLE SAY THAT THEY LOVE RATS’