Update: Victor the HeroRat at Six Months Old

Annamaria on Monday

Readers who have followed this blog over the last several months will have met Victor, my adopted HeroRat.   I heard about the work of APOPO from a blogpost of Michael’s last April.  They are a Belgian NGO based in Tanzania, Mozambique, and Cambodia  that trains African giant pouched rats to detect landmines and tuberculosis.   I adopted one of the critters at the cost of $8 per month, named him Victor, and designated that he would work in mine detection.  From time to time, I update everyone on Victor’s progress so far.   He is six months old now.  Here is the latest report:

Victor just sniffed out its first deactivated landmine!  

The landmine that Victor detected is an "anti-personnel" type, and is only the first of many, many more that it will help APOPO's mine action teams detect in the years to come.  And because the mine contained TNT, Victor needed almost no additional training to be able to correctly identify it.   Starting at this stage of training, Victor will work in areas of APOPO's training field that contain some partially exposed and some completely buried, deactivated landmines. 

There are many different types of landmines that endanger civilian populations around the world.  Some are "anti-personnel" and some are "anti-vehicle," but nearly all of them contain the explosive compound, TNT.   Anti-personnel landmines pose a direct threat to human and animal life in dozens of countries and are specifically manufactured to target people.  The anti-vehicle mines are used primarily during wartime to prevent the trucks and tanks of the conflicting groups from entering an area. 

Manufacturers of landmines use TNT because it is stable, even in moist environments, meaning that the landmines can remain active in the soil for many decades, a hidden threat to anyone who passes by or wants to develop the land. Once through with the full training, Victor and the other rats in its team will be able to detect not just mines, but also other explosive remnants of war such as bombs and small arms and ammunition.



 Victor’s training is taking place simulated minefield in Tanzania, where, in collaboration with Tanzanian Peoples Defense Force,  APOPO has developed a beautiful 240,000 square meters training ground at the foothills of the Uluguru Mountains.  Victor and his trainers work among more than 1,500 deactivated landmines.  The field also contains grass, rocks, insects, and many other distractions.  There Victor is becoming accustomed to the challenges he will face someday in a real minefield.

Victor would like to introduce you to one of its favorite trainers at APOPO in Tanzania, Mark Shukuru.

  

 

This province of Mozambique now mine-free thanks to HeroRats like my Victor!

It is not just humans who suffer from unexploded mines.

In the past, Victor’s predecessor HeroRats and their APOPO handlers turned over a mine-free Gaza province to the government of Mozambique and Instituto Nacional de Desminagem (IND).  APOPO's Mine Detection Rats and its Mozambique country staff accomplished this feat more than a year before the deadline!

APOPO is now preparing their heroes—humans and rats—to go to Cambodia, where unexploded ordinance has taken its greatest toll in history.  40,000 Cambodians, over one-third of them children, have lost limbs.  There are an estimated 4 to 6 million mines and unexploded ordinance in that small country.   Perhaps, once he is fully trained, Victor will go there to help.  Whether or not he himself does, his APOPO teammates will soon be there, saving lives and limbs. 

If you want to help by keeping Victor’s HeroRat confreres in mangoes and peanuts and their trainers and managers in business, you can do so by going here:

https://www.apopo.org/en/donate/order/start/app

VIVA Victor.  Onward to Victory.

Hero Rats

The bad news out of South Africa this week is the outbreak of xenophobic violence in some parts of the country.  Based on the age-old principle that if something is going badly for you it must be someone else’s fault, foreigners – almost exclusively black people from elsewhere in Africa – must be the cause of the slowing economy and lack of jobs.  In the words of Pete Seeger’s song, when will they ever learn?

Angola minefield. Looks harmless?

But just for a change I want to report on a good news story from Africa. Land mines. Well, the land mines themselves are not a good news story, quite the opposite.  When Portugal decided more or less overnight to pull out of its African colonies of Angola and Mozambique, it left a power vacuum that soon became a battleground for control between competing “liberation” movements, often with the backing of outside powers playing their own dirty games.  Among other things, this led to minefields of horrendous proportions, particularly in Angola.  Although the war there ended in 2002, most of the mines remain and they remain active.  Often they surround towns that are expanding and need more land for crop growing.  The results are inevitable and often horrific.

High tech mine detector

Clearing the mines is a painstaking and dangerous business. It involves using metal detectors to clear paths and then to work outwards from safe ground.  Multiple false alarms bring the process to a halt until the cause can be definitely identified.  Various more remote technologies have been tried, including the remote detection of the chemical signatures of the decomposition products of the explosives.  The success rate is quite good, but would you be willing to accept “quite good” if you were walking in the area?  And these technologies are not cheap.

Dogs have been tried in the past, but there are problems, not the least of which is that they can set off the mines.  

Enter the hero of our story, the Gambian Pouched Rat.

It has always seemed to me that the rat has had a very bad rap.  They are smart, successful in a wide variety of environments, and tend to clean up after us.  Of course, they can transmit diseases, but no one’s perfect.  And they are said to make excellent and affectionate pets.

A hero rat on the job

But these are working rats.  They have an extremely sensitive sense of smell, and can be trained to pick up the scents arising from buried land mines without difficulty.  Best of all, they are too light to set off the mines, and they run on guide wires that ensure that their handlers can follow them safely and investigate their discoveries.  They have a much lower false alarm rate than metal detectors; the process of clearing an area can proceed more quickly and efficiently.  Because they are doing such a great job, they have become known as the Hero Rats.  You can see them in action in a recent New York Times video HERE.  And if you want to know more about them, and even maybe to “adopt” one (the rats accept Visa and Mastercard), take a look at the Apopo site HERE.

Did I mention their great whiskers?

It’s a good news story from Africa – rats to the rescue!  Now if we could persuade rats to generate electricity, we might be in with a real chance!

As one Nose to another...

Michael – Thursday.