Ability To Detect Land Mines and Tuberculosis By Scent
These rats are also becoming useful in some areas for detecting land mines, as their acute sense of smell is very effective in detecting explosives, and they are light enough to not detonate any of the mines. The rats are being trained by APOPO, a nonprofit social venture based in Tanzania.
The procedure for training rats to detect land mines was conceived of and developed by Bart Weetjens of the Netherlands. Training starts at four weeks of age when the rats are handled to accustom them to humans and exposed to a variety of sights and sounds. They learn to associate a clicker with a food reward of banana or banana-peanut paste. They are then trained to indicate a hole with TNT in it by nosing it for five seconds. Then they learn to find the correct hole in a line of holes. Finally, the rat is trained to wear a harness and practises outdoors on a lead, finding inactivated mines under soil. At the end of their training, they are tested: they must find all the mines in an area of 400 square metres that has been seeded with inactivated mines. It is a blind test: their handlers do not know where the mines are. If they succeed, they are certified as bomb-sniffing rats.
APOPO is also training the rats to detect tuberculosis by sniffing sputum samples; the rats can test many more samples than a scientist using more traditional methods—hundreds in a day vs. 30 to 40. Land mine and tuberculosis sniffing rats are called HeroRATs.
Read more about this topic: Giant Pouched Rat
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