From the APOPO website:
THE PROBLEM
Over 60 countries are contaminated with hidden landmines and other explosive remnants of war, that cause tragic accidents and hamper communities from developing their productive land.
Meanwhile, slow and inaccurate detection methods make tuberculosis the world’s most deadly infectious disease. 10.6 million new people contracted TB in 2022, 3.1 million went undiagnosed, and 1.3 million died from the disease.
THE SOLUTION
APOPO’s scent detection animals, nicknamed ‘HeroRATs’ and ‘HeroDOGs’, help to rid the world of landmines and tuberculosis – returning safe land back to communities for development, and freeing people from serious illness so they can get back on their feet.
We are probably the target demographic for a place like the APOPO Visitor Center. Cambodia is full of landmines from the civil war ( Khmer Rouge) in the ’70s’ and the “American” (Vietnam) War, when bombers with leftover bombs would drop them near the border or on the Ho Chi Min Trail. Many are unexploded, making vast swaths of land on usable.
The red areas above are still dangerous areas with unexploded ordinance.
APOPO has a 16 month training course for African giant pouched rats to sniff out explosives. They can sense 1 part in a trillion of TNT from a meter away. This means they can process an area in 3 hours that it takes traditional metal detectors 3 days to process. This is partly because metal detectors identify all metal, including shrapnel, as potential targets. The rats can also smell plastic landmines. Their weight is such that they don’t explode mines, where dogs do.
We saw a demo. They direct the rats back and forth, taking a step for each rep. When the rat senses explosive, it stops and “ponits.” It is then rewarded with banana.
After about age 5, the rats are retired, where upon they can eat as many bananas as they want.
Here is the story of Magawa –
The rats not only smell explosives, they can be trained to smell tuberculosis (3 second sniff of pee), search for bodies in natural disasters, and are being trained to smell some types of cancer.
I needed to check the rats out further, and can tell you, they may be cuddly, but they can also be not good-looking.
