Merry is usually up before the sun, when she and her 11 colleagues are driven to work. Her job, detecting landmines and other unexploded ordnance (UXO), requires a laser-like focus. It also helps that at about 1kg in weight, she is very light of foot and does not set off the explosives.
Merry is an African giant pouched rat, or Cricetomys gambianus, a docile and exceptionally smart rodent with a superior sense of smell. She is one of a team of HeroRATs that are bred, trained and deployed by the Belgian non-profit Apopo, headquartered in Tanzania.
After helping to detect mines in Mozambique and Angola, the group partnered the Cambodian Mine Action Centre in 2015.
Cambodia is one of the most mine- and UXO-contaminated countries in the world. More than 1,600 square kilometres of the country is still contaminated by mines and other explosive remnants of war. More than 64,000 people were killed or injured by them between 1979 and February.
Harnessed and tethered to a cable that extends across a 10m by 20m grid and attached to handlers on either side, the rats work the ground with their noses, inch by inch, back and forth. They do this swiftly, checking an area the size of a tennis court in 30 minutes.
When a rat smells TNT, the explosive compound found in most landmines, it will stop and focus on that area before scratching lightly at the soil. Once the scent is confirmed, the teams begin a careful excavation to uncover what lies beneath.
Specially trained HeroRATs have also proven successful at sniffing out tuberculosis in Tanzania and Mozambique.
Quick and effective, the rats are also inexpensive to feed and house. Also, they can cover more ground in a shorter amount of time than a person with a detector, speeding up operations and freeing up funds for other needs.
Read more here.
Source: The Straits Times, 24 June 2017