Description
Magawa and his rat colleagues goal is to clear millions of mines left behind from wars and conflicts.
According to APOPO team, more than 60 million people in 59 countries continue to be threatened by landmines and unexploded ordnance. In 2018, landmines and other remnants of war killed or injured 6,897 people.
While many rodents can be trained to detect scents and will work at repetitive tasks for food rewards, APOPO decided that African giant pouched rats were best suited to landmine clearance because their size allows them to walk across minefields without triggering the explosives and do it much more quickly than people.
Magawa is part of a cohort of rats bred for this purpose. He was born in Tanzania in 2014, and in 2016, moved to Cambodia’s north-western city of Siem Reap, home of the famed Angkor temples, to begin his bomb-sniffing career.
APOPO is a Belgian non-profit organisation they only not trained pouched rats but also doggies to detect landmines and tuberculosis and other disease. They call their trained animals HeroRATs and HeroDOGs.