THE REAL RAT PACK
A band of brave rodents is helping to rid Africa of landmines and tuberculosis. Paul Ash met the virtuous vermin at their training camp in Tanzania
IT is dawn on the east coast of Africa. As first light creeps across the fields, a young boy walking to school on a path in Maputo province makes a mistake and steps into the unkempt grass under a power pylon.
In a Dar es Salaam slum 2 000km away, a trembling woman spits bloody mucus into a cup.
In Morogoro, three hours’ drive on the highway heading west from the Tanzanian capital, sunlight creeps down the flanks of the Uluguru Mountains, where, in the cool morning on the Sokoine University of Agriculture campus (motto: “Land is Treasure”), two dozen rats in plastic crates are being loaded onto a truck.
The earth erupts under the boy’s feet and he feels the hot, dirty morning like flame on his legs and a short, unforgivable pain as his eardrums burst. The woman, her breath rattling in her throat, hacks up more thick spit. The truck with the rats aboard turns out of the campus gates and rattles out of Morogoro into the pink-cheeked dawn.
It is two decades since the end of the civil war in Mozambique. It is 100 years since Western Europe got a grip on tuberculosis. But in Mozambique — and Angola and Cambodia and another dozen countries — landmines, waiting in the soil, maim or kill people every day. Across Africa and Southeast Asia, TB — one of the great scourges of history — still kills as surely as a biblical plague of old.
Ridding the planet of landmines and tuberculosis is the driving force behind the Belgian NGO Anti-Persoonsmijnen Ontmijnende Product Ontwikkeling, or Apopo for short.
Using the African giant pouched rat to do it was one of those lightbulb moments. Apopo founder Bart Weetjens, who kept rats as pets, was mulling over ways of tackling the world’s landmine scourge when he stumbled across research in which gerbils were being used as scent detectors.
Sociable, adaptable, long-lived, easy to train, and — crucially — small and light, Cricetomys gambianus is an interloper in the macho world of landmine clearing. Sniffer dogs, yes. Or metal detectors, wielded by brave people, swinging back and forth over suspect ground. Men in blast visors, prodding the soil with bayonets, or bulldozers churning up the earth — that’s the stuff of mine hunting. Rats? Are you on drugs?
“A lot of people try to pitch the rats against dogs,” says Tim Edwards, Apopo’s head of training and behavioural research. “I’m sure there are niches where the dogs would do better than the rats and niches where the rats would perform better. We use the rats in situations where they fit nicely.”
Apopo’s headquarters and training academy occupy a huddle of low brick buildings at the edge of the campus. With its tin roofs and swept concrete paths, it feels like a ’70s army training camp, which it is, only the recruits have sunnier dispositions and the food is much better.
Training starts with habituation, when the four-week-old rats begin interacting with people and various objects and are exposed to a range of sounds and smells. They go on truck rides. Their handlers play with them, and introduce them to human objects — a table, chairs, a ball-shaped tea infuser . . .
After that they start clicker training, in which the rats learn to associate the sound of a click with food.
“You use the click to reward the behaviour that you want,” says Edwards. “Our target behaviour is scratching over TNT and the scent of explosives.” For the TB rats it’s pausing over the scent of Mycobacterium tuberculosis .
The young mine-action rats are taught to wear a little harness and learn to sniff out the tea infusers — now packed with TNT — buried in a sandpit, while their handlers work them from side to side of the pit using a long tether on their harnesses. The TB rats go to Apopo’s TB detection centre where they sniff samples collected from clinics in Dar es Salaam.
The rats’ main weapon — their extreme sense of smell — is a double-edged sword. “We can’t smell the target,” says Edwards, “and we have to be very careful when we’re developing our training and operational protocols that we don’t accidentally train them on the wrong scent.”
That means using sterile apparatus and boxes and boxes of rubber gloves. And plenty of bananas, avocados, peanuts, dried fish, carrots and tomatoes. Edwards laughs. “We say the rats eat better than we do and that’s probably true.” The trainers have to get it right. It costs à6 000 (about R88 000) to train a single rat, which means making the most of each one. Some rats are more energetic and harder to control. Others are more docile. Some work better in the early morning. “We try to put them in positions where they are best suited,” says Edwards.
Training takes nine months. By then the rats are mature enough and ready for operations. The mine-action rats do a blind test, in which even the handlers do not know where the mines are, before being deployed.
Apopo’s rats have already earned battle honours in the killing fields of Inhambane and Gaza provinces in Mozambique. Now they are hunting mines near Ressano Garcia, close to the South African border. Soon they will be deployed in Angola and Cambodia, two of the most heavily mined countries on earth.
“In Gaza we were finding 20 mines a day,” says field training coordinator Laurence Kombani, one of Apopo’s veteran de-miners.
Kombani tells stories of mines laid at the base of the power pylons that march from Cahora Bassa dam to South Africa. “Some pylons, there is nothing. Others will have 10 mines. But we have to search every one.”
That is the curse of the landmine. A mine, an unnamed Khmer Rouge general once told Unicef in Cambodia, is the most excellent of soldiers, “ever courageous, never sleeps, never misses”. Or as Colombian army engineer officer Mauricio Moreno told the Global Post with tired cynicism: “It doesn’t eat, it doesn’t ask for vacation, it doesn’t need to rest and it is active for 30 years.”
It matters not who laid them — at Ressano Garcia it was probably Frelimo soldiers trying to defend the pylons from Renamo attacks — but that they will wait, patient and deadly, until they are stepped on.
The first man to be killed by a pressure mine
was a Union Army scout whose horse triggered a device on the road to Yorktown in May 1862 during the American Civil War. That mine was invented by Gabriel J Rains, a Confederate general who had lost a thumb and forefinger in a previous attempt to design a primer that would explode under the slightest pressure.
Rains’s mines brought fresh barbarity to warfare such that even hardened soldiers were revolted. “It was not war but murder,” Union Army general William Sherman said in 1864.
Murder is the right word. Step on an antipersonnel mine like the ubiquitous PMN-1 which contains roughly 250g of high explosive, and the blast will strip the tissue off your tibia and drive dirt, debris and bits of bone and flaming metal into what remains of your leg. If you are a peasant in a country with bad roads and no ambulances or paramedics, you will probably die.
Or, maybe your kid steps on the fuse of a longforgotten bounding mine like an OZM-72. There is a bang as the first charge lifts the mine out of the ground to about waist height, then a second blast as it explodes its freight of 2 500 steel fragments, shredding and eviscerating any living thing within a 25m radius.
Or how about an anti-tank mine — 6kg of TNT in a round case that needs a pressure of 120kg to set off — but buried on top of an anti-personnel mine, a nasty parting gift from the man who laid it so that whoever steps on it will disappear in a fine red mist and bits of shredded clothing?
Just as well, then, that the African giant pouched rat is light on its feet.
By full light, the mine-action rats are at the training ground, a 30ha piece of land cleared of bush and dotted with defunct anti-personnel and anti-tank mines.
Each crate has a name scrawled on it with a marker pen: Ace. Faith. Toyota. Sasha. Sweet. Avatar. Leo IV. Sanchez. Patel. Kim. Pink. Sofia. Satusiri. They scratch and squirm in their crates, noses twitching as they scent the morning air.
The mined areas are clearly marked. There are lanes about 5m wide in which mines lurk under a thin covering of soil. Other large areas have been scattered with ordnance.
Gazing idly at a patch of sand, I break out in a cold sweat when I realise that the slightly discoloured soil near my foot is the top of an anti-tank mine. Discipline is strict — nobody ever steps into the lanes, even though the mines have been rendered safe. The only living creatures allowed in the mined areas are the rats.
A shrike is calling from the forested mountain slope behind us and the hair on my neck prickles as a rat named Pete sniffs the air then scratches frantically on the surface. The trainer, Abu Chongore — fresh from lifting mines in Mozambique — presses the clicker and smiles. Pete dashes over to grab the banana Chongore is holding. Do that in the killing fields, Pete, and you are going to save a little boy’s life.
By 9am, it is too hot for training. The rats are put back in their crates and returned to their pens at the training base. But work is only just beginning in the cool, disinfected confines of the TB centre where sputum samples, collected by motorbike messenger from clinics in Dar es Salaam and rushed to Morogoro, are waiting for second-line screening.
In the next hour, the TB rats will dash up and down their glass boxes, pausing to sniff each sample and suddenly pausing for a few seconds with their noses deep in the hole over any that are suspect. It will take each rat about 15 minutes to sniff 100 samples.
Suspect samples are flagged. That could mean the difference between life and death for the young woman with a chest-scouring cough in a Dar es Salaam slum. Or in Maputo. Or Cambodia.
All because a rat named Alexis paused briefly over a cup of mucus in a laboratory at the foot of the faraway Uluguru Mountains.
Adopt a rat, save a life
Apopo runs a rat adoption scheme which allows human “parents” to see their rat grow up, get trained and go to work in a minefield or TB centre. For more information on how you can take part in the scheme and contribute to saving someone’s life, see www.apopo.org/en/edopt.