The Not-So Dangerous Lives of Mine-Sniffing Rats

Featured in Ripley's Believe It or Not!

Mine-Sniffing Rats

Imagine you live in a war-torn region. There are bombs and landmines littering the countryside, and anywhere you go carries the possibility of being blown to bits. How do you go about fixing this problem? With mine-sniffing rats of course.

A Belgian nonprofit company called Apopo has been training rats to recognize the smell of TNT. They don’t use your standard variety rat either. The African giant pouched rat grows up to three feet long. They have poor eyesight and an excellent sense of smell and hearing. These attributes make them perfect for the job of sniffing out buried explosives.

He’s so cute in his little harness.

Hot To Train a Mine Detecting Rat

From the moment they open their eyes, the rats are socialized to get used to humans and the stimuli of the world.

After that, they are conditioned through click training similar to that used to train dogs. They learn that a click means they get food, and they are given food when they correctly identify the smell of TNT. They are trained to differentiate between smells and zero in on the scent of TNT, and when they do it correctly, the trainer clicks the clicker and gives them food.

How it’s Working

As you might imagine, sending an army of rats into a country to tackle their landmine problem is a dubious situation at best. Most people don’t really like rats.

But they’re cost-efficient, they’re easy to transport, they’re easy to train, and they don’t set off the mines because they’re too light. – Operations Coordinator Theap Bunthourn

In spite of the general dislike towards rodents, the people of Cambodia are having to accept their help in dealing with this problem. Dozens of people are killed each year due to landmines and other pieces of unexploded ordnance. In addition to the deaths, the country is taking a substantial financial hit. Because the explosives are all over the place, the amount of land available to farmers decreases.

Not only are the mine-sniffing rats incapable of setting off the bombs, but they also work faster and more efficiently than deminers.

You see this 200 square meters? They clear in only 30 minutes or 35 minutes. If you compare that to a deminer, maybe two days or three days. – Cambodian supervisor Hulsok Heng

The rats are better because they single in on just the landmines. A mechanical deminer works more like a metal detector. That means that all of the metal in the area will be detected by it. And every time the machine beeps, the inspector has to investigate. The rats, however, will ignore random bits of scrap metal, so each time they react, the trainer knows it’s a real landmine.

By APOPO via Wikimedia

Source: The Not-So Dangerous Lives of Mine-Sniffing Rats