TRAVELLER

Taking the lead:

a teamin search of unexplodedordinance. The giant ratsuse their remarkablesense of smell to locateTNT – an explosiveused in landmines

TRAVELLER

INSIDEAFRICA

THE RATS’ TALE

In Mozambique,

Eric Nathan

catches up with some unlikely heroes dedicated to making the country a safer place

’m in a remote region of the southernMozambican bushveld and the mercury isnudging 40°C. The undergrowth is alive withspiders, scorpions and venomous snakes, butit isn’t the obvious presence of the local wild-life that is causing me to tread carefully. There isan altogether more frightening latent killer thatlurks unseen in this wilderness: the landmine.Nonexistent expiry dates make these the scourge of much of the developing world, but in Mozambiquea novel mammalian ally is being employed to ridthe land of this plague: the giant African pouchedrat (

Cricetomys gambianus

).These animals, weighing an impressive 3kg andaround 75 centimetres long, have an incrediblyacute sense of smell – which makes them idealrecruits to sniff out TNT (the primary explosivecomponent of most landmines). They have beensuccessfully clearing suspected hazardous areasin Mozambique since 2004.Theirs is not some sort of self-sacrificing, fur-clad Kamikaze mission. They are not sent over thetop to detonate mines – far from it, these animalsare highly trained and represent an extremelyvaluable asset to Apopo, the Belgian mine actioncompany NGO that runs the programme.Bart Weetjens, a Belgian product developmentengineer, was the driving force behind this Africansolution to an African problem. Following theenormous publicity given to the landmine issuein the mid 1990s, Weetjens decided to undertakean analysis of the situation.‘I found that detection was a bottleneck thatcreated a big dependence on foreign expertise,’ hesays. ‘I’d bred rats as pets when I was a child andI was aware of their extraordinary sense of smell.I felt there was an opportunity to apply that skillto the landmine problem.’Giant African pouched rats were selected as thespecies of choice because they are indigenous to Africa and had the longevity required to justify thetime needed to train them. The programme’s train-ing base is situated on the campus of the SokoineUniversity of Agriculture in Morogoro, Tanzania.Here the rats are captive-bred and then trained forapproximately six months. The training is basedon teaching the rats to associate a clicking soundwith the smell of TNT using a food treat (mostoften banana) as a reward. Once the associationis established, the clicking sound is then usedto modify the animals’ behaviour. On success-ful completion of their training they become

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