Credit: APOPO
So yesterday, I adopted an unborn land-mine-detecting African giant pouched rat (Cricetomys gambianus)
from Tanzania. Did I spend 20 minutes figuring out what I was going to
call it, as one of my many privileges as an adoptive parent? You bet. It
eventually came down to a character from my favourite video game, and as I figured The Chosen Undead would be tempting fate just a little too aggressively under the circumstances, Knight Solaire of Astora
was born. Or rather, will be born in two weeks, as an email promptly
informed me once I’d made my first monthly payment for my new son or
daughter’s future tuition.
APOPO
– which stands for Anti-Persoonsmijnen Ontmijnende Product Ontwikkeling
in Dutch, or Anti-Personnel Landmines Detection Product Development in
English – is an organisation that trains and deploys rats, named
HeroRATS, for the detection of abandoned land mines and tuberculosis.
Founded in 1997 by Belgian rat-enthusiast, Bart Weetjens, APOPO
partnered with the Tanzanian People’s Defence Force and the Sokoine
University of Agriculture in a city called Morogoro in the southern
highlands of Tanzania, where they now maintain their headquarters and
training facilities.
Since 2000, they’ve bred hundreds of trained and accredited rats that
have so far found 1,500 buried land mines across an area of 240,000
metres squared in Tanzania, and 6,693 land mines, 26,934 small arms and
ammunitions, and 1,087 bombs across 9,898,690 metres squared in
Mozambique. They’re also operating in Thailand, Angola, Vietnam,
Cambodia and Laos. And don’t panic – they’re too light to be setting off any buried explosives.
A spin-off project that trains tuberculosis-detecting rats has so far
produced 54 accredited rats for use in 19 TB clinics in the Tanzanian
city of Dar es Salaam. Since 2002, they’ve screened 226,931 samples and
identified 5,594 TB patients.
HeroRAT detecting TB. Credit: APOPO, Briana Forgie
Other than being super-smart, these are by no means ordinary rats. In
fact, they’re not even ‘true’ rats at all – they belong to an entirely
different family (Nesomyidae) from your regular house rat (Muridae).
Growing to around 0.9 metres (3 feet) long – their tails make up half
their length – and 1.4 kilograms (3.1 pounds) in weight, African giant
pouched rats are pretty humungous. They’re native to Sub-Saharan Africa,
ranging from Senegal to Kenya and from Angola to Mozambique, where they
live in communities of 20 or so, relying on their keen senses of
hearing and smell to make up for their relatively poor eyesight.
Get ready for it, because this is the adorable part – the ‘pouched’
reference in the species’ name doesn’t refer to the kind of pouch that
carries babies, but rather the kind that sits on the inside of the
cheeks for extra food storage. So these guys are pretty much giant,
really intelligent hamsters.
Land mine detection training typically takes about nine months
from when a rat pup opens its eyes at four weeks old. First the pups
are socialised, encouraged to interact with their caretaker and trainer,
their kennel-mates, and the outside world. They’re exposed to a range
of different stimuli, including radios, flowers, coffee, and different
surfaces such as grass, concrete and soil, to ensure they’re comfortable
and familiar with whatever they’ll end up encountering. Very important
is getting them familiar with the HeroRAT lorry, which will eventually
transport them to and from their training grounds.
Lane mine detection training. Credit: APOPO
“During one week, I will be taking the pups outside the kennels for
about 20 minutes every day. I let them smell different odours like tea,
coffee and oil, they get to hear different sounds like a ringing phone
and human voices and they get to wander around on different surfaces as
sand, wood, grass and concrete,” caretaker Albert Carol says at the APOPO website.
“I make sure they are exposed to all kind of smells, textures and
sounds, but especially to being handled by people. Every individual pup
gets plenty of attention and learns to be held and carried by the
trainers.”
Next, the rats are trained in associating a ‘click’ sound with a food
reward – bananas are their favourite. They work with a target scent,
TNT, to earn a click and a reward. The difficulty is increased when
they’re exposed to various scents before progressing to sandbox
training, where the target scent will be buried under sand and the rat
must walk in ‘lanes’ up and down systemically to scout the entire area.
And then they finally make it to the training grounds. Here’s what it looks like:
Once this training is complete, the rats are put through a rigorous
and independent two-day exam, during which they must undergo a ‘blind
test’ where not even their trainers know where the sample land mines are
buried, so they can’t unwittingly give their rats visual cues. Only if
the rats score 100 percent in this test will they be accredited and
their trainers officially licensed to operate on actual minefields
around the world.
African giant pouched rats usually live to eight years old, making them a pretty great investment. This also goes for the TB-detecting rats, one of which can evaluate in 10 minutes more samples than a lab technician can do in an entire day.
I’ve only just adopted one of these rats (for $7 USD per month),
and Knight Solaire of Astora is expected to be born in two weeks, so I
can’t say much about the experience yet, but you do get a really sweet certificate
and a portal on the website where you can log in and see how your
HeroRAT’s training is going, and then eventually, how many land mines
it’s detected.
And now here’s a ridiculous song about them that will definitely get stuck in your head:
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