These Huge Rats Can Sniff Out Land Mines | National Geographic

2m read

·Nov 11, 2024

We bring the Gambian Jan rats from Africa to sniff out the landmines in Cambodia. There is a two million landmines spread out in Cambodia. Two hundred to three hundred people got injured by landmines and you SOS every year.

These rats look similar to the rodents we know; the difference is that these are white rats. They do not see the rats that are used to be in our houses, so they are bigger than the rodents that we know. They are faster than a human. Why are they faster? Because the rats are only going for TNT smell, and the human using his metal detector is going for all kinds of metals.

In a 5 by 20 meters box, a trained rat can finish the box in 16 to 25 minutes only. If we use the manual metal detector, it can take two days or three days to finish. For us, just leave your rat if you get free for quite some time, and then we get, oh! We can tell a dog to sit; it can sit. You tell a dog to go; it can go. But a rat cannot understand all those kinds of things.

So, we only communicate with them by using a clicker. When the rat smells TNT, it starts to scratch, and then I have to click and give food to the rats. By the size, I feel very, very emotional. I got very, very, very, very, very excited. I don’t know who or who is who. I don’t know. They not only click for food; now I want to touch the rats.

If I see four regions right on the rat that is hit by a car, then it pains me a lot. They laugh like his brother or her sister. Sometimes they carry like his baby or her baby. As we know, landmines are dangerous for our lives. If our rats are able to discover landmines, then they save lives.

I hope that in the future, the people of Cambodia will get enough land to live and improve their lives.

Steve Elkins Q&A | Explorer

Scarcity of resources

View All

How Does A Carburetor Work? | Transparent Carburetor at 28,546 fps Slow Mo - Smarter Every Day 259

This is a carburetor, and this is a special 3D printed see-through carburetor. And this is a high-speed camera with a macro lens on it. You see where this is going. If you’ve ever cranked some type of lawn care product with a small engine on it, you have …

State of the aviation industry amidst war in Europe

Most of the globally aware and affected population were a bit shocked last week when Russia actually initiated its invasion of Ukraine. Of course, I’m not a political accommodator, but war is horrible no matter how you look at it. My heart goes out to all…

Identifying value in digits

So I’m going to write down a number, and I’m going to think about how much do each of these digits of the number—what value do they represent? And actually, let me pick on this 2 here. What does that 2 represent? Does it just represent two, or does it rep…

The Harsh Bottom of the World | Continent 7: Antarctica

I think it’s important for people to know about what’s happening in Antarctica, not only just that the science that goes on down there, but what that science is actually trying to tell us about the future of this planet. Most of the research is really foc…

Mathilde Collin on Feature Prioritization and Employee Retention at Front

I think the most pressing and important question is this first one from Tomas Grannis about Lego. Yes, what’s your favorite Lego theme? Yeah, my favourite Lego theme is something that not a lot of people know. It’s called Ideas. Okay, and so basically yo…

Adapting when doing business with different cultures!

The old days when 80 percent of the Jets were owned by U.S corporations and 19 of the worldwide jet ownership was in Europe, it was one percent all around the rest of the world. Most of the people in the U.S or in Europe are used to Western ways of doing …

These Huge Rats Can Sniff Out Land Mines | National Geographic

More Articles