I find these stories endlessly fascinating. Rats Train in Tanzania to Sniff Out Mines:
Far from the outbreak of monkeypox that shed light on a worrisome increase in exotic pets in the United States, Mathias and his African pouched rat pals are hard at work in rural Tanzania learning how to locate land mines.In their little red, black and blue harnesses, they look like miniature sniffer dogs. But their trainers at Sokoine University of Agriculture say the giant rats can do a much better job.
“Rats are good, clever to learn, small, like performing repeated tasks and have a better sense of smell than dogs,” said Christophe Cox, the Belgian coordinator of the rat training project.
When they succeed, they get bits of ripe bananas.
[...]
Some 30 trainers put the rats through their paces in the simulated minefield where anti-personnel and anti-tank mines have no detonators.“People are happy when I tell them I am working with the rats because they think I will help to eliminate them,” project veterinarian Mwambewe Martin said. “But when I tell them I am training them, they don’t understand how rats can be trained.”
Harnessed rats are hitched to a sliding rail mounted on a metal grid about 3 feet high and 20 feet wide.
Two human handlers roll the grid over a suspected minefield. When a rat scratches and sniffs at a mine, the handler activates a clicker and pulls the rat over to the side by his lead to reward him with a banana bit.
When fully trained, the rats sniff out a mine, then sit and scratch at the spot until they are rewarded with food. A human de-miner destroys the mine. The rats are not heavy enough to detonate active mines.