A Rat’s Tale

You’ve probably heard stories about rats invading fast-food restaurants in N.Y.C. or being accidentally adopted as dogs in Mexico, but in Africa, rats are being used to save lives.

In Mozambique, African giant pouched rats, which have a phenomenal sense of smell, have been trained to sniff out landmines. The deadly weapons, leftover from the country’s civil war that ended in 1992, still cover an estimated 170 million square miles of land.

The rats—light enough to not detonate the landmines—were trained by receiving food for a successful find. They indicate a mine’s presence by scratching the ground or grooming themselves.

The program is run by APOPO (an organization founded in Belgium in 1998, whose Flemish acronym essentially translates as “product development geared toward the demining of antipersonnel mines”), in conjunction with the Mozambique government and from the international organization Handicap International.

Rats have turned out to be much cheaper to train and maintain than dogs or other animals. In fact, APOPO has a website—herorat.org—where donors can adopt a rat and fund its training and upkeep for five euros a month.

APOPO is also experimenting in Tanzania, using rats to detect tuberculosis by sniffing people’s saliva. Early tests have been promising, the charity says, and, if successful, the method would be much cheaper and quicker area than standard hospital and laboratory tests, and could therefore be implemented over a much wider region.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 21st, 2007 at 9:27 pm and is filed under Under-reported. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a comment, or trackback from your own site. Add to del.icio.us.