Hero Rat
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https://www.npr.org/2020/09/25/916892377/hero-rat-wins-a-top-animal-award-for-sniffing-out-landmines
For the first time, one of Britain's highest animal honors has been awarded to a rat. The animal has detected dozens of land mines in Cambodia and is believed to have saved lives.
Magawa is a Tanzanian-born African giant pouched rat who has been trained by the nonprofit APOPO to sniff out explosives. With careful training, he and his rat colleagues learn to identify land mines and alert their human handlers, so the mines can be safely removed.
Even among his skilled cohorts working in Cambodia, Magawa is a standout sniffer: In four years he has helped to clear more than 1.5 million square feet of land – an area about the size of 20 soccer fields. In the process, he has found 39 land mines and 28 items of unexploded ordnance.
In a virtual ceremony Friday, the U.K. charity PDSA gave Magawa its gold medal for his lifesaving work.
"This is the very first time in our 77-year history of honoring animals that we will have presented a medal to a rat," PDSA Chair John Smith said during the proceedings.
APOPO uses positive reinforcement methods that give the rats food rewards for accomplishing tasks such as finding a target or walking across a surface. Then they're trained in scent discrimination: choosing explosive smells over something else to get a food reward.
Though they have terrible eyesight, the rats are ideal for such work, with their extraordinary sense of smell and their light weight – they are too light to trigger the mines. When they detect a mine, they lightly scratch atop it, signaling to their handler what they've found.
Their reward: a banana....
Cox said the rats hone their skills in a training field and are only cleared to begin work once they have perfect accuracy over an 8,600-square-foot area with various stages of complexity.
"We really trust our rats, because very often after clearing a minefield, our teams will play a game of soccer on the cleared field to assure the quality of our work," he said.
