Meet the GIMP!

This is Rosie, a HeroRAT. Rosie is still in training to become a professional land mine detector in Africa, but I expect outstanding performance of her. In one of the Focus Ring talks I already plugged this project, but the adoption link was not working. But now it is.

From the website:

HeroRATS are trained sniffer rats that detect explosives and diagnose disease. This unusual idea has been developed into a competitive technology by a group of Belgian and Tanzanian researchers and animal trainers under the umbrella organization called APOPO. APOPO was initiated in response to the global landmine problem. In the mid 90’s it was well recognized that most mine clearance techniques in use were slow, expensive, and dependant on foreign expertise.

Bart Weetjens, the founder of APOPO, got his first experience with rats as his childhood pets. Years later he remembered his pet rats when he became discouraged by the scourge of landmines in African countries and the expensive, time consuming, and foreign technologies available to clear them from the land. With their terrific sense of smell and trainability, rats could provide a cheaper, more efficient and locally available means to detect landmines. These would be HeroRATS.

Through partnerships with Antwerp University and Sokoine University of Agriculture, Bart set up laboratories in Belgium and Tanzania to begin training and testing African Giant Pouched Rats in the detection of explosive materials. Bart’s hunch about rats proved correct and the trainings were a tremendous success.HeroRATS can use their highly sensitive and accurate sense of smell to identify the presence of both metal and plastic cased landmines, and can be trained to detect a number of different things like explosives, tuberculosis bacteria, tobacco, contraband, etc.

Working with the Geneva International Center for Humanitarian Demining, accreditation standards have been established to license the mine-detecting HeroRATS and over 30 trained HeroRATS are now working to demine Mozambique. From these beginnings, APOPO has also expanded its HeroRAT programs to detect Tuberculosis. Further uses are being explored, such as the ability to conduct search and rescue operations in rubble after disasters.

I pay 5€ a month for Rosie’s needs and hope she’ll have a long and successful life. BTW, they are too light to set off the mines - the just sniff them out for a bit of banana.

In the video you see one of Rosie’s colleagues at work in a Tanzanian mine field. The area between the two men holding the line is still not demined. The men are walking on strips of land cleared by hand - a slow and dangerous process. The deminer is kneeling on the ground and pushes a steel needle into the ground in front of her. Cautious of course. If she finds something hard, she starts to dig. If it is a mine she retreats and a specialist either defuses the mine or blows it up. This demining by hand takes a very long time.
Metal detectors and these rotating chain drum machines are not of much use against most anti personnel mines. They don’t find 100% and the chains destroy the top soil. Both is acceptable for military use, but not for making an area habitable again.

The rats are trained to sniff out TNT. If the find it they start to scratch the ground (1:11 in the video). Then the handler makes this “knickknack” sound with a toy, the rat comes to him and gets some food. The position of the scratching is marked in a chart. This is repeated with an other rat. Then a deminer takes care of the marked spots. Up to now the rats have not “oversmelled” a mine. There are false alarms, but not many. BTW, the code of honour among deminers requires them to have the first walk over an area they have declared as cleared. So quality of work is assured by simple darwinism.

Under the week this is the only food for the rats, on weekends they have a feast. On workdays they are either on a real minefield or on an already cleared strip with training mines. So they get enough to eat - but only by working for it. Has some parallels to the human condition….

I said once: “No ads here!”, but here is one:

Tags: herorats, land mines

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 31st, 2008 at 1:12 am and is filed under Service. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.