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Bomb-Sniffing Rats Save Lives in Africa
March 05, 2010 4:39 PM
ABC's Bradley Blackburn reports from New York:
Everyone knows that rats have a nose for garbage, but their sense of smell now serves another higher purpose -- sniffing out landmines to save lives. Bomb-sniffing dogs are a common sight in airports and other public spaces, but an organization called APOPO says that rats can do similar work, sometimes even better than a dog.
"We have 50 rats working in minefields in Mozambique at the moment," Mic Billet, the president of APOCO, said in an interview from his office in Antwerp, Belgium.
APOPO is funded primarily by the Belgian government, with a facility in Tanzania where they train some very talented rats. The rats look somewhat like the rodents found in American pet stores or labs, but they're much larger. Called African Giant Pouched rats, they grow about 2.5 feet in length including the tail, weigh over 3 pounds, and can live 8 years.
According to trainers, a rat's sense of smell works just as well as a dog's to detect mines, and the creatures' small size gives them some big advantage on the minefield. Not only are they easier to feed and transport, "their light weight makes it highly unlikely they would set off a mine by scratching or pointing," APOPO writes on its website.
It takes between six months to a year to train a rat's sense of smell, and Billet says they're easy to work with.
"They are very friendly," without being needy, he said. "When you work with a dog, you have to say, 'Good boy!' A rat doesn't need that. The rat tells you, I try to find the contamination, and if I do, you will feed me."
His rats find plenty of contamination, averaging 2 to 5 landmine discoveries a day in Mozambique. But what's more important, Billet said, is the number of acres that have been given back to the local people.
"In Mozambique, we gave 1,300,012 acres back," he said, helping nearly 45,000 people in 2009 alone.
APOPO has dubbed the rodents "Hero Rats," but the idea to use rodents for this work was laughed off at first. Billet and a colleague came up with the idea back in 1995 when they were brainstorming ways to help landmine victims. Originally, they planned to build prosthetics for victims but then decided to deal with the root of the problem by finding a better way to get rid of mines. After months of research, they came up with rats.
A professor at the University of Antwerp, Billet went to the university's biologists to ask if the idea could work.
"In the first minutes they thought, 'the old man is getting a bit nuts or Alzheimer's is coming on,'" he remembered. They were soon convinced, though, and after a two-year feasibility study, the rats showed they were more than up to the task.
APOPO started off training bomb-sniffing rats, but they're now using the rodents for other purposes. They've trained some rats to detect tuberculosis, taking them into African hospitals to test samples quickly, cheaply and more accurately. "Last year, the rats detected 905 positive TB samples, all classified as negative by the labs," Billet said.
So if rats are so good at this work, is there a chance you'll see a rat on a leash, standing guard at the airport sometime soon?
"It's absolutely possible to use the rats in airports," Billet said, "but at this moment, we don't work on this implementation."
Maybe not in airports yet, but even the most rat-phobic have to admire this clever and successful way of improving lives and preventing landmine-related deaths.
March 5, 2010 | Permalink | Share | User Comments (12)
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Any complaints from PETA yet? ;-)
Posted by: JustMe | Mar 5, 2010 10:20:30 PM
What an incredible story! Why aren't these heros who defied all the conventional wisdom and the experts given the Nobel Prize instead of Jimmy Carter or Al Gore!
Posted by: tom | Mar 5, 2010 10:21:46 PM
Now that is some incredible stuff.
Posted by: Adrienne | Mar 5, 2010 10:29:29 PM
Agree completely JustMe. But the reason is probably that it doesn't cost $10 million per rat.
Posted by: MeToo | Mar 6, 2010 1:01:49 AM
Sorry I meant Tom. Right on, Tom.
Posted by: MeToo | Mar 6, 2010 1:03:11 AM
Now this is a news story. Cheers to the biologists-scientists-trainers and of course the rats.
Waaaaay cool & smart.
Posted by: LibertinTexas | Mar 6, 2010 7:55:12 AM
Cool story. It's refreshing to hear some good news.
Posted by: Daniel Martinusen | Mar 6, 2010 8:30:51 AM
So because of Human evil ways, Innocent creatures are subjected to our mistake. Rats would never make bombs to kill other rats, but humans build bombs to kill other people. Now who is the Real Dirty Creature??
Posted by: max | Mar 6, 2010 8:57:02 AM
If the rats can prevent deaths and future amputees, then I'm all for it.
I just had an idea:
You know how the taliban can hide in Afghanistan and Pakistan's caves?
Why not send a whole lot of rats with fleas (or more potent material) into these caves? When the taliban runs out of the caves, we would be waiting for them?
Posted by: unconventional warfare for an unconventional war | Mar 6, 2010 3:00:38 PM
This is SO fantastic. My son had a pet rat and we thought he was very smart and made a great pet. Better than a dog. Now this. Three cheers to those smart, clever loveable rodents. Maybe they will become the new "man's best friend."
Posted by: Hollymar | Mar 8, 2010 7:06:52 PM
I'm with the cheering squad on this one!
What a NEAT story!
I grew up on a small ranch, and sometimes I had to fetch hay from the barn to feed the cows and horses. Hay bales stacked up in a barn are a rat's (and mouse's) idea of a beach condo in Malibu. But I quickly got distinctly "un-fond" of our furry little friends, because they'd try to bite me *before* scattering when I disturbed their nests. And sometimes they succeed ("sometimes" re the biting; they almost always succeeded at the scattering!).
I wonder if even smaller rats can be trained for these purposes -- they could get into even smaller spaces to sniff for bombs, for instance. Or train them as "video spies": strap a tiny videocam streamed to a receiver on it, turn it loose in, say, and air-donditioning duct to go to a particuler vent and broadcast away! :-)
I had heard about dogs sniffing out TB, but this is the first I've heard of rats. How common are the rats in the story? I mean, are there enough they could be trained and exported to other countries? That would be great, especially if it could be done relatively cheaply. I live in Thailand, and the border regions still have a lot of landmines leftover from the war years. Cambodia and Laos could use them in a big way, too.
Giant bomb-sniffing rats. Wonder if the guys and gals on the Bomb Squad will get p.o.'ed? -- threat to their job security, those rats!
I never thought I'd get a smile out of reading a story about wretched landmines. Who woulda thunk it???
A double thumps-up and a salute to The Rat Squad and their human servants!
Posted by: MekhongKurt | Mar 9, 2010 12:28:59 PM
Who would have thought that Rats would be saving the day, their lighter and easier to accomodate in hostile environments and dont need the day to day necesseties like a dog and his handeler...
I look at my rattie curled up in my tshirt beside my laptop while i write this and considder some of the other notes written, and wonder in the future, what we will be doing with these highly inteligent little guys... My rat named 'Rat', has only a year or so left of life, but in honestly within these two past years - they have been the best most wholesome years of my life with a pet...
I hope peoples ideas about small critters like these changes and people appreciate their lives like dogs or cats...
Andrew S
(Australia)
Posted by: Andrew S | May 1, 2010 7:20:20 AM
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