Dogs also tend to become bound tot heir trainers, which rats do not do, making them easier to handle and transfer between locations and trainers. They are also smart enough to learn repetitive tasks very quickly, but they don’t get bored or distracted easily like dogs would. Additionally, rats are easier to get a hold of, feed, breed, and take care of in the long run. Why rats though? Why not dogs? Though both species have great senses of smell, rats have the advantage that because their eye sight is so bad, they compensate with their sense of smell all of the time, making it stronger than that of dogs. Rats are fairly quick tools to raise confidence there aren’t any mines in a large area” ( BBC.com). “and that’s where these animals are important. For these reasons, Guy Rhodes of the Geneva International Centre for Humanitarian Demining believes that the rats are a much better alternative to metal detecting technology “You can spend a lot of time and money to find out there’s nothing,” he said. Using only the scent of explosives also allows them to detect plastic landmines as well that a regular metal detector could not do. Rats beat out technology when it comes to this because they’re trained to smell explosives rather than detect metal, allowing them to bring about far less false positives than a metal detector would. Even more complicated is the fact that most explosive detectors react based on metal any kind of metal. They can vary in type, age, and environment all of which alter how difficult they are to find. The process is particularly difficult because there’s no ‘one size fits all’ when it comes to the mines. “We’ve been the only new technology that’s made it to the field out of those hundreds and hundreds of efforts,” says the company’s CEO, Christophe Cox ( BBC.com). There are other manual ways of detecting the landmines, but they are generally very expensive and time consuming. Though hundreds of millions of dollars have been put towards improving landmine detection, APOPO’s rat method is the only one to actually begin making a difference. Before the use of the rats, that would just be unrealistic. The company believes that they can clear Mozambique of all the mines in less than 20 years. They’ve discovered more than 2,406 landmines, 992 bombs, and 13,025 small arms and ammunition from Mozambique’s countryside all of that falling across 6 million square meters of land. Since 2006 when the rats began their work there, though, they’ve certainly made a dent in that number and proven their worth. Between the years of 19, tens of thousands of landmines were planted during the civil war, and most have remained dormant over the years. But the country needed help out of 78 countries that are scattered with landmines, Mozambique is one of the highest risk areas. We were thinking to grill them” (BBC.com).The visual of the rats is even more shocking they’re actually much larger than those stereotypical NYC sewer rats that everyone is afraid of. “In Mozambique we eat rats,” joked Alberto Augusto, the director of Mozambique’s national demining institute, “so it was very strange to see them working and demining. Weetjens first brought the rats to Mozambique in 2006 and naturally, the government officials weren’t sure what to think. The company trains what the public fondly calls, “HeroRats”, though their proper name is the Mine Detection Rats (MDRs). The founder of the organization, Bart Weetjens, had rats as childhood pets when he was growing up in Belgium, and in 1998 he registered APOPO as a non-profit organization. The two biggest of these movements are for mine and Tuberculosis detection. APOPO () researches, develops, and uses detection rat technology to save lives in any way they possibly can. But a Belgian non-government organization is out to change that whole mentality. Even in Africa, rats have always been looked down upon as a nuisance, an infestation, and the last resort when there’s nothing else to eat for dinner. When most people think of rats, they picture the stereotypical New York City sewer version giant rodents with red eyes that creep around at night.
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