20101113
africanews

Light, with a great and acute sense of smell, giant African pouched rats are being trained to sniff out landmines in fields in Tanzania. The country is campaigning to train the highly effective 'weapon' to be used in ordinance clearing.

The rats are being trained by a pioneering Dutch team, APOPO – a non-governmental organization that launched the project for the first time in Tanzania.

In Mozambique, the rats have already been used to smell out the deadly ordinance in infested war zones including in Chimoio, becoming an effective biological weapon of its kind.

“This work is not easy,” recounts trainer Abdullah Mchomvu. “You have to be patient. Sometimes I get frustrated, but then again I tell myself these are animals.”

This work saves lives, he adds. It takes two de-miners a day to clear a 200 square-metre (2,150 square-feet) minefield, but if they work with two rats they can sweep it in two hours.

Twitching their sensitive pointed noses, the rats are trained by two experts rolling a bar that guides them to go back and forth across the patch in a straight line. They are motivated by food rewards.

The rodents are trained to detect the TNT in landmines through Pavlovian conditioning – a click sound to signal a food reward – a bit of a banana - whenever they make a correct detection, reported Topix.

Training begins at four weeks old when the baby rats are exposed to distinguish TNT scent from other smells. A painstaking on-and-off field training of nine months is what is takes before a rat can be deployed for mine detection.