A Nose for Trouble

What you need to know:

  • Valuable: Giant mine-detecting rats are saving lives and protecting livelihoods in Africa and Southeast Asia.

Merry usually wakes before the sun rises and is driven to work along with 11 of her colleagues. They work for a few hours, napping between shifts. Her job, detecting landmines and other unexploded ordnance (UXO), requires a laser-like focus. It also helps that at about a kilo in weight, she’s very light of foot.
Merry is an African giant pouched rat, or Cricetomys gambianus, an exceptionally smart rodent with superior olfactory abilities. She’s one of a team of “HeroRATs” bred, trained and deployed by the Belgian nonprofit APOPO, headquartered in Tanzania. After working successfully to help detect mines in Mozambique and Angola, the organization partnered with the Cambodian Mine Action Centre in 2015.
Cambodia is one of the most mine- and UXO-contaminated countries in the world. The impact on communities has been nothing short of devastating. According to the latest figures from the Cambodia Mines/UXO Victim Information System, more than 64,000 casualties were recorded between 1979 and February of this year.
Tethered to a cable and attached to handlers on either side, the HeroRATs work the ground with their noses, sniffing for TNT. They are able to check an area the size of a tennis court in 30 minutes, much faster than a person with a detector.
“The impact has been big,” said Vendeline Shirima, APOPO’s international mine-detection rats supervisor from Tanzania. “We never miss mines using rats.”

For more info about APOPO go to – www.apopo.org

If you would like to support APOPO why not adopt a HeroRAT?”