Rats

Rats

We’ve been travelling in Southeast Asia. As much as we love visiting remote parts of the planet, it’s always a joy to come home. It has always been our policy to tell friends and neighbours not to inform us of any trouble at home while we are away. Unless the events are dire, there is nothing we can do but worry.

Back home, everything was fine, except for a hole in the door to our basement. It seems a rat had chewed its way in while we were away.

There aren’t many household problems quite as distressing as an invading rat. These creatures are amongst the most reviled animals in our culture. Normally even a suggestion of a rat in my house would set off a murderous rage.

But this time my ratophobia was tempered by our experience while away.

Our Asian bicycling the odyssey included a visit to the city of Siem Reap in Cambodia. Siem Reap is the home of the fabulous jungle temples of Angkor Wat. They were spectacular, but best memories are from our visit to APOPO.

APOPO is an organization that trains rats to find land mines. At the APOPO centre we learned about the extent of landmine problems, watched rats at work and got to hold some of these special animals.

There are fifty-three countries in the world that still are infested with landmines. In 2023 there were 5,757 casualties from mines including 1,983 deaths. While these weapons are intended to harm soldiers, eighty four percent of the injuries and deaths are in civilians and thirty seven percent involve children.

Thinking people agree that the idea of landmines is horrendous. In 1997 world leaders met in Ottawa and signed a treaty banning the use of landmines. 164 countries have signed the Ottawa agreement. It shouldn’t be a surprise that Russia, China, and the United States have not signed.

When wars end, landmines are left behind to kill and maim innocent people. Millions of acres of land around the world have been made unusable because of the presence of mines.

The main way that mines are usually cleared is with metal detectors. The main drawbacks of this method are the risk to operators and the fact that any buried metal will register as a mine.

Dogs can smell explosives and have been used for mine detection, but they are large enough that they can trigger explosions.

Rats have a sense of smell that rivals the abilities of dogs, and their smaller mass allows them to walk over mines without triggering them.

APOPO breeds giants pouched African rats in Tanzania and trains them for mine identification. The rats are left with their mothers for a few weeks and then socialized with people. For their first year of life, they are taught to recognize TNT and scratch the ground when they smell it. The rats can sense one millionth of a gram of the explosive buried a foot in the ground.

After training the rats are sent into the field to work. Handlers have the animals move back and forth on a leash over ground suspected to be infested with mines. When the rats smell TNT they scratch and run to a trainer for a reward of banana. When they’ve eaten their treat, they go back to the mine and after verifying their find are given a peanut.

Because the rats are nocturnal, they don’t like sunlight, so they work for three hours early in the morning and have their ears and tails covered with sunscreen.

The APOPO rats have uncovered over 100,000 landmines and released 22 million square meters of land back to local people.

I’m still not thrilled about the rat who chewed a hole in my door, but after visiting the APOPO center, I have a new respect for these amazing animals.