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“Addictions can be very, very bad but addiction itself is not bad.
It’s a case of what you’re addicted to.
You better live each day like it’s your last, ‘cos one day you’re going to be right”.
Ray Charles.
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Mozambique's vicious 16-year civil war ended in 1992, however the country remains littered with innumerable mines.
Many were planted by the Portuguese in the 1960’s and others by the national government but regardless of their origin, they are still a massive problem for the citizenry.
Enter the Hero Rat, the giant Gambian pouched rodent and with upwards of 50 million mines around the world, this problem has spawned some very alternative solutions to replace the traditional approaches of either armoured mine-clearance vehicles which can only operate on flat terrain or mine sniffing dogs which are viable but with mixed results.
The project began when researchers from the Sokoine University in Tanzania began training rats which are known for their advanced sense of smell and can be trained to do exactly what their handlers want them to do.
The Hero Rat project is proving so effective that a new batch of mine-sniffing rats is scheduled to be deployed in Angola to build on the success of an initial crew of 10 rodents that successfully sniffed out all the mines in fields totalling 130,000 square feet around a village in southern Mozambique.
Here they are practicing for their second deployment.
A grassy field on the edge of town has been set up to resemble a real minefield ready to be cleared. Dozens of 100-square meter plots are demarcated by markers and strings, red perimeters signify areas of dangers, while green marks the safe zones where the handlers stand, connected to their rats by a rope pulley system.
The mines buried here are harmless having been already detonated but still containing the traces of TNT that the rats have been trained to sniff out and two rats can clear a 200-square-meter area in one hour, where it takes one human de-miner two weeks to clear the same area.
And unlike dogs, which grow attached to individual handlers, the rats are happy to work with anyone, so long as they are fed.
In fact it’s the handlers who have grown attached to the rats.
