Do not kill this one! Many people, when they see a rat, have only one thing in mind: Kill it. But do not kill this one. He saves lives.
An African giant pouched rat has been awarded a prestigious gold medal for his work detecting land mines. Magawa has sniffed out 39 landmines and 28 unexploded munitions in his career.
The UK veterinary charity PDSA has presented him with its Gold Medal for “life-saving devotion to duty, in the location and clearance of deadly landmines in Cambodia” – with the inscription: “For animal gallantry or devotion to duty”. Of the 30 animal recipients of the award, Magawa is the first rat.
The seven-year-old rodent was trained by the Belgium-registered charity Apopo, which is based in Tanzania and has been raising the animals – known as HeroRATs – to detect landmines and tuberculosis since the 1990s. The animals are certified after a year of training.
Magawa – born and raised in Tanzania – weighs 1.2kg (2.6lb) and is 70cm (28in) long. While that is far larger than many other rat species, Magawa is still small enough and light enough that he does not trigger mines if he walks over them. The rats are trained to detect a chemical compound within the explosives, meaning they ignore scrap metal and can search for mines more quickly. Once they find an explosive, they scratch the top to alert their human co-workers. Magawa is capable of searching a field the size of a tennis court in just 20 minutes – something Apopo says would take a person with a metal detector between one and four days. He works for just half an hour a day in the mornings.
