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.

Deep Sea Exploration - 360 | Into Water

We Have To Talk About Weed

View All

Tea...For Dinner?: A Day in the Life of a Scientist | Continent 7: Antarctica

[Music] Got it. Um, sweet. What are you doing right now? I am about to have tea. So, tea is a New Zealand term for dinner, which confuses Americans because New Zealanders also drink a lot of tea. Oh, that sounds good. Cooking? I’m sitting on dinner, so…

1st Taxpayer-funded EV Station

We have the first taxpayer-funded EV charging station in the country. What does this say about the state of play with our EV infrastructure in the country? It’s way behind schedule, obviously. It’s actually taken back many companies that are thinking abo…

Re: The Trouble With The Electoral College – Cities, Metro Areas, Elections and The United States

Hello, internet. Let’s talk about this map, this argument, and the Electoral College in general. In my “Trouble With The Electoral College” video from 2011, I was wrong to use the city limits for that part of the argument, rather than the more expansive m…

Plate tectonics and the ocean floor | Middle school Earth and space science | Khan Academy

Imagine that all the Earth’s oceans disappeared for a day, and imagine that you, being the excellent explorer you are, decided to go investigate. You travel across the continental shelf, down the continental slope, and across the abyssal plain. You’d see …

The Problem With Elon Musk

Uh, I mean, my mind is a storm. I don’t think most people would want to be me. They may think they would want to be me, but they don’t. They don’t know—is your storm a happy storm? No. I’ve grown tired of hearing the name Elon Musk and not really understa…

Flying the Piaggio at 41,000 Feet (Max Altitude!)

Hello from beautiful Jackson Hall, Wyoming, one of my all-time favorite airports to fly out of. We’re back in the Piaggio; you guys have been asking for more content with this thing, so here we are. Today, we’re going to push this airplane to its limits, …

These Huge Rats Can Sniff Out Land Mines | National Geographic

More Articles