Trained rodents sniff out mines

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Tell a New Yorker that rats can save lives and he might consider it an impossible trick for the beady-eyed sewer dwellers.

But for the past 10 years, a group of Belgian researchers based in Tanzania have been training a species of giant African rats to sniff out land mines and unexploded ordnance.

"When people see they can use these animals for humanitarian purposes, it changes their perception," said Bart Weetjens, whose nonprofit group, Apopo, has pioneered the use of the African or Gambian giant pouched rat in mine detection. "People find it most fascinating."

By teaching local residents how to handle the rats — a food source for some Africans — the group hopes to develop a cheap, reliable, indigenous resource for de-mining, an expensive and dangerous process that typically operates in unstable, war-ravaged regions.

"The whole philosophy of the project is to provide local people with tools and techniques so they can manage to deal with the problem themselves," Mr. Weetjens said.

Mr. Weetjens and Apopo hope the creatures, the largest rats by size in the world, will join hand-held metal detectors, armored vehicles and dogs in the effort to detect and remove land mines, which kill or maim as many as 20,000 people a year, according to the International Campaign to Ban Land Mines.

The campaign, a grouping of about 1,400 nongovernmental organizations from 90 countries, issued a survey last year that listed more than two dozen African countries dealing with buried anti-personnel mines and mine contamination. The problem was especially acute in Angola, Mozambique, Sudan, Ethiopia and Eritrea.

Angola — along with Afghanistan, Cambodia and Colombia — is thought to have one of the world's most severe problems, with an estimated 7 million land mines hidden in unmarked fields four years after the end of a long civil war, the government said.

'African technology'

With its headquarters at the Sokoine University of Agriculture in Morogoro, Tanzania, Apopo has 50 rats working in Mozambique and plans to expand to Angola within two years if it can secure enough funding. Thirteen other African countries have expressed an interest in the program, Mr. Weetjens said.