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.

15 Character Traits You Notice When Hanging Out With Rich, Successful People

Give Me Some Slack | Dirty Rotten Survival

View All

Definite integral of absolute value function | AP Calculus AB | Khan Academy

So we have F of x being equal to the absolute value of x + 2, and we want to evaluate the definite integral from 4 to 0 of f of x dx. And like always, pause this video and see if you could work through this. Now, when you first do this, you might stumble…

15 Dumb Ways to Spend Your Money

Alex, do you ever find yourself, like halfway through the month, and wonder where your paycheck went? Well, you’re not alone. Okay, we all have those moments where we splurge a little bit too freely, sometimes in ways that might make us cringe later on. L…

Save the Ocean, Save Ourselves | Sea of Hope: America's Underwater Treasures

There’s been this arc to my career in the sense that in the beginning I just wanted to make beautiful pictures. But I began more and more to see all these problems happening in the ocean. Fewer fish in the places I used to see many fish, or not as many sh…

It Started: The Reverse Housing Crash of 2023

What’s up, Graham? It’s Guys here. So, when it comes to the housing market, we have some good news and some bad news. Because in the last 30 days, despite ever-increasing mortgage rates and home prices falling by the largest amount since 2011, new forecas…

For parents: Setting a daily learning schedule for elementary school students

All right, hi everyone! Thank you so much for joining our parent webinar on how to create a schedule for your third through fifth-grade student, as well as how you can use Khan Academy resources and tools to support your child’s learning at home. So you c…

How to Study Way More Effectively | The Feynman Technique

This video is sponsored by brilliant.org, a math and science problem-solving website that helps you think more like a scientist. In a 2007 graduation speech, Charlie Munger told an interesting, but fictional, story about two people: the great scientist Ma…

These Huge Rats Can Sniff Out Land Mines | National Geographic

More Articles