Sniffing out Trouble

Strictly speaking, this isn't a wildlife story, but it is an animal story & very interesting. So I'm calling it close enough.

I recently lost a pet, and I got a lot of weird looks when I told people that I was upset because my pet rat had just died. I spend most of my time hanging out with "animal people," so it surprised me that so many people are still biased against rats. With any luck, this story will help boost their image alitttle.

My pet rat as a baby

Mozambique, Africa was caught in a bloody civil war from 1977 to 1992. A large amount of the fighting was done indirectly using land mines. Unfortunately, now that the civil war is over, Mozambique is still riddled with land mines. It's estimated that 15,000- 20,000 deaths and injuries are caused by land mines every year.
Africa's giant pouch rats (which grow to be the size of small cats) are being trained to sniff out these mines. Their training happens in three phases. The first phase includes handling the rats every day from a very young age so they are used to people. The second phase includes teaching the rats what TNT smells like and training them to scratch at the ground when they smell it. The last phase includes bringing the rats outdoors to add other smells into the mix and practice actually digging up the mines.

Rats work especially well for this project because they don't grow large enough to set off the mines, they have an extraordinary sense of smell, and they are surprisingly easy to train. They are also a lot easier to transport than dogs, which they were using before Bart Weetjens came up with the great idea to use rats instead.

This idea sounds pretty dangerous, both for the rats and the trainers. But since the program began in 1997, there has only been one human casualty (caused by a car accident, not a land mine) and a few rats died due to moldy peanuts but no rats have been harmed by mines.

Here's a video of a rat in action (the songs kinda silly):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WS1gh3QtB44

Researchers are using the same idea to train rats to sniff for tuberculosis in human spit. This is a relatively new project and there isn't too much information about it right now, but early reports sound promising! A properly trained rat can test up to 150 samples in 30 minutes, while a human using a microscope can only test 20 samples in an entire day.