Giant Field Rats have been trained to snif out and clear land mines in Mozambique by a Belgian company APOPO. The rats are too light to detonate the sensitive anti-personnel mines
Worldwide there are about 70 million landmines enough work for the rats for hundreds of years!
The New York Times > International > For Sniffing Out Land Mines ...
Mine-sniffing rats are the sole focus of Apopo, a Flemish acronym for "product ... for an animal with a dog's sense of smell, but none of its drawbacks. ...
The New York Times > International > For Sniffing Out Land Mines, a Platoon of Twitching Noses - Similar pages
Land mine - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Because these rats have a high sense of smelling and are light, they are suited to detect landmines without being blown-up.
Apopo - Why using rats? ...
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_mine - 64k - Cached - Similar pages
Giant rats to sniff out tuberculosis - 16 December 2003 - New ...
The rats have already been successfully used to detect land mines by their odour ... director of the rat programme at Apopo, a Belgian research organisation ...
Giant rats to sniff out tuberculosis - 16 December 2003 - New Scientist - 35k - Cached - Similar pages
Mario's Cyberspace Station: Animals of war
The test mine field consists of hundreds of real landmines (without detonator! ... Animals of war Mine-sniffing rats are the sole focus of Apopo, ...
mprofaca.cro.net/rats.html - 29k - Cached - Similar pages
[PDF]
For Sniffing Out Land Mines, a Platoon of Twitching Noses
File Format: PDF/Adobe Acrobat - View as HTML
Mine-sniffing rats are the sole focus of Apopo, a Flemish acronym for "product ... dog's sense of smell, but none of its drawbacks. ...
http://www.gichd.ch/fileadmin/pdf/ab...YT_18May04.pdf - Similar pages
[PDF]
A nose for danger
File Format: PDF/Adobe Acrobat - View as HTML
I thought: 'if rats can detect landmines, why not TB?'," says Weetjens. ... a rat does 150 in 20 minutes" - and that enabled APOPO to lever $165000 (£85000) ...
http://www.gichd.ch/fileadmin/pdf/ab..._10March05.pdf -
