It’s been a busy morning for Cletus, Meynard, Victoria and others in their furry band. Tiny noses and long whiskers twitching, they’ve scurried and sniffed their way across 775 square metres of fields to eliminate a scourge that has killed thousands of Cambodians: land mines.
Meet the Hero Rats: intelligent, surprisingly adorable creatures with some of the most sensitive noses in the animal kingdom. Sent from Africa, where they successfully cleared minefields in Mozambique and Angola, they began the same task in northwestern Cambodia early this month and have already scored tangible results.
Two hectares have been declared mine free around this village where more than 15 people have been killed or wounded by the explosives, forcing some to abandon their homes and rice fields and seek jobs elsewhere.
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One villager, Khun Mao, says the rats have been sniffing for suspected mines in a rice field he had been afraid to cultivate for years. He says that while it is too soon to say whether the rodents can remove every mine, “To me, these rats are wonderful.”
“The villagers have started to get excited about farming their land again. You can see the light in their faces,” says Paul McCarthy, Cambodia programme manager for the Belgian charity APOPO, or Anti-Personnel Land Mines Detection Product in English.
On a recent morning, the African giant pouched rats were working two suspected, taped off minefields. Each rodent wore a harness connected to a rope strung out in a straight line between two handlers standing about five metres apart and outside the danger zone. The rodents then darted from one handler to the other, constantly sniffing the ground and only taking time out to scrub their bodies with tiny front paws or to answer nature’s call. The handlers moved a step or two down the field to repeat the process, and a second rat was later sent over the same terrain to double check.