Mine Detection Rats Cambodia

More than 20 years after the internal conflict in Cambodia ended, the country is still littered with millions of mines. To speed up the detection of these explosive remnants of war, the demining teams receive support from an unlikely ally: giant African rats.

Since the 1970s, Cambodia has been in successive wars that killed millions of people and ravaged the country. And until today, people suffer the consequences. Large amounts of unexploded ordnance remain buried in the ground, most notably in the northwest, along the Thai border.

After the fall of the barbaric regime of Pol Pot in 1979, many of the Khmer Rouge soldiers were forced into Thailand. These armed troops as well as other factions, such as the Vietnamese and the Cambodian army, then laid mines to prevent movement of the enemy. Landmines were cheap, effective and easy to deploy. But people placed the explosives at random and didn’t keep track of the locations. Now, decades later, people have forgotten and it’s a monumental task to find out where the mines are buried.

In the east, near Vietnam, there’s another high concentration of unexploded ordnance: the remains of the 7.5 million tons of munitions that the US and its allies dropped on Southeast Asia during the Vietnam war. In 2016, the US released the database of these bombing missions, which makes pinpointing the contaminated areas much easier.

Identifying and clearing the minefields in the northwest is painstaking, expensive and dangerous work. It can take a human deminer with a metal detector up to four days to complete an area of 200m2, depending on the amount of scrap metal present. Bringing in a mine-detection rat significantly speeds up the work. With their help the same area can be completed in about 20 minutes.

The idea to use rats as mine detectors came about in 1995. Belgian scientist Bart Weetjens, who used to have rodents as pets, realized that rats have an extraordinary sense of smell and they can be trained. Within a few years, he had gathered enough support to open research facilities in Tanzania. The ngo ‘APOPO’ was born. The African giant pouched rat, nicknamed ‘HeroRAT’, was chosen as the best candidate for the mission, in part because of its long lifespan.

At the time, mine-detection dogs had been operating on the field, but compared to them, rats have a few big advantages. First, they are a lot more cost-effective: it costs around US$8,000 to train a HeroRAT and after that, their expenses are negligible. Training and care-taking of mine detection dogs easily gets to a multiple of this. Secondly, the rats are too light to set off a mine, thereby drastically decreasing the danger for both animal and human deminers.

After successfully being deployed in Africa for years, the HeroRATs travelled outside of the continent for the first time in 2015. Now, there are around 50 rats active on the Cambodian minefield. To date, APOPO and local partner organization CMAC (Cambodian Mine Action Centre) handed back over 15,000,000m2 of land to local communities and destroyed more than 5,000 mines and over 40,000 other explosives.

And there’s more. The innovative method of APOPO turned out to be useful in addressing other humanitarian challenges, such as detecting tuberculosis. The HeroRATs are faster and more accurate than the standard technology used in clinics. They have become a cost-effective, but extremely valuable asset in the fight against the world’s most deadly infectious disease. APOPO’s is currently studying if the rats can be trained to detect trafficking of hardwoods and wildlife.

APOPO is a global non-profit organization that trains and deploys African giant pouched rats, nicknamed HeroRATs, to save lives. To contribute to APOPO’s mission, you can adopt a rat or buy them a box of bananas: https://www.apopo.org/en/support-us