They track down landmines, detect tuberculosis, help combat illegal trade and can even find survivors after earthquakes: the rats trained by the Belgian NGO APOPO are saving lives worldwide. From its base in Tanzania, the organisation has been training these rodents for over 25 years.
Landmine detection & earthquake recovery: Belgian ‘hero rats’ save lives around the world
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“Imeldo is a highly trained and recently certified mine-detection rat, also known as a HeroRAT. HeroRATs like Imeldo use their exceptional sense of smell to safely detect explosives, faster and more accurately than existing methods.”
This may sound like a character from a children’s book, but Imeldo is a real rat. The Belgian organisation APOPO trained him to detect landmines, just like hundreds of other “hero rats”.
The African rat’s exceptional sense of smell makes it well-suited to detecting explosives. They are also intelligent, relatively inexpensive to train and light enough not to trigger landmines. Released into an area where there may be landmines, the animal reacts when it thinks it may have detected one. A deminer then goes to the spot with a metal detector to identify and defuse the explosive.
But how does a rat know where potential danger lies? “First and foremost, we breed them ourselves,” APOPO CEO Christophe Cox told Radio 1’s De Ochtend. “Then we tame them and train them using ‘clicker training’.”
When the animal hears a click during training, it knows it will receive a reward. Trainers gradually build on this by introducing scent. If the rat gets close to the scent of explosives, it hears a click and receives a reward.
“That’s how we make it increasingly difficult,” Cox explains. “Until we certify the rats on our own training minefield here in Tanzania. Then it has to comb through those 800 square metres and remove all the mines. Finally, the animal can be exported to start work.”
At present, the rats are detecting mines in Ukraine, Angola, Cambodia and Azerbaijan. But they are also proving extremely well-suited to detecting diseases and have already prevented half a million tuberculosis infections, Cox says.
To this end, APOPO works with more than 200 hospitals in Tanzania and Ethiopia, where the rats use their exceptional sense of smell to check samples that have already been tested for tuberculosis. According to the organisation, this enables them to detect a further 45 to 50% of infections that went unnoticed during initial screening.
“These are people who, without our rats, would be told they do not have tuberculosis and sent home,” says Cox. “They then fall ill and may also infect family members.”
The animals are also used in the fight against the illegal trade in protected species. At a port and an airport in Tanzania, the rodents check parcels for the scent of items such as ivory, rhino horn and pangolin scales.
“There is a lot of illegal export of these products from this region. Our rats sniff the parcels and can detect these goods,” says Cox.
And then there’s the final item on the rats’ remarkable list of tasks: assisting with search and rescue operations following earthquakes. For this, the rats carry a specially designed rucksack containing a camera and communication equipment, so rescue workers can track their movements.
“Because the rats are so small, they can penetrate much deeper into the rubble than, for example, dogs,” Cox explains. The project is being tested with a major Turkish search and rescue organisation in Antalya.
