Cambodia unveils statue to honour famous landmine-sniffing rat

dennis_jeeves2

I spent the last minute observing in silence, in memory of this remarkable creature. HN sheep, I command thee all, to do the same.

pancakemouse

If you visit Siem Reap, you can visit the APOPO visitor centre, and see the rats (and a demonstration!) for yourself. Highly recommended. - http://apopo.org/support-us/apopo-visitor-center/

monster_group

Stark reminder of how precious and meaningful a life can be - of any creature, no matter how small. We should be nice to all creatures not just humans.

dtsykunov

> Magawa retired from bomb sniffing in June 2021 owing to his old age, as is standard for APOPO's HeroRATs. > He spent a number of weeks mentoring 20 newly-recruited rats before ultimately retiring to a life of "snacking on bananas and peanuts". > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magawa End to life worthy of being envied.

ballooney

I don’t like this site’s obsession with reducing everything to market opportunities, but… it’s extremely well documented that land mines, white truffles, cancer, diabetes, chemical weapons, etc can all be ‘sniffed’ by animals and it’s a mechanism that is almost always ‘better’ (cheaper, quicker, more deployable in the field) than human-engineered solutions. Surely there’s some vebture capital opportunity here for better sensors that would unarguably improve our lot more than AI, at least per dollar invested?

the-grump

These are the creatures we kill with poison and carry experiments on.

salad-tycoon

Wonder how hard it would be to train for diabetes? My under 10yo was just diagnosed with T1DM, a pocket rat sounds like fun and cheaper than a dog which is priced at unobtainium prices for us. Animals are awesome, land mines are not. I hope we can avoid ever bringing that to our shores. Sadly, I know we now have air-mines (drones) so guess someone has to come up with drone sniffing pidgins or something (though obviously a parked drone probably doesn’t persist as long as a buried stationary mine and a flying drone less so). War sucks.

cdrnsf

RIP Magawa. Animals are wonderful. My grandmother had seizures for the latter part of her life and her doctors were unable to determine the root cause. A Great Dane mix her and my grandfather rescued was able to sense when one a fit was coming on and would lean on her until she was lying down and safe.

quirkot

Magawa cleared 1,517,711 sq.ft of land. He could work at a pace of 2,808 sq.ft (a doubles tennis court) every 20 minutes. If he maintained that pace, he worked 180.2 hours. Let's assume, with hazardous terrain, he worked 25% that speed on average. If that's the case he worked ~720 hours during a 5-6 year career. A different rat, Ronin, that found more stuff found a total of 124 explosive devices. So Magawa found no more than 1 explosive for every 5 hours and 45 minutes of searching. Or approximately one device every 17.25 tennis courts of searching. Real needle in a haystack stuff, wow

mikkupikku

Rats are incredible animals, and this is a well deserved honor.

jampekka

Sadly demand for such heros may increase in the future. Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Ukraine and Finland withdrew from the Ottawa Treaty banning personnel mines. And probably more countries will follow.

ajb

One demining expert claims that the rats are actually no good, but the charity persists with them anyway: https://nolandmines.com/APOPO%20rats.html I have no expertise. His arguments sound very plausible though.

cjkaminski

Finally, some excellent news that honors the contributions of a (once) living creature that made the world a better place (presumably without conflicting ulterior motives).

donbrae

What a hero. Rats are so smart. I previously asked what I think was an official account on Instagram and was relieved that the rats are apparently too light to set off the mines.

neom

If you're into rats, here is a playlist with 6+ hours of rats doing tricks: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLGThSDBAdLEKFkcKeHc0D... Rats are so awesome, we just need to GMO them to live longer.

downboots

Fever dream interview question: 100 landmines are cleared per hero rat. How many rats needed to restore peace in Eurasia?

teleforce

I think instead of cloning on a static meaningless statue, much better if we clone Magawa in term of functionality and cabability, and name the landmine detection machine device Magawa. Japanese researchers have already successful in detecting sub-surface bamboo shoots for culinary, because young bamboo shoot underneath the ground taste better than apparent overground ones. Let's invent a landmines detection robotic device namely MAGAWA for Mines Apparatus Ground Assessment Waveform Analysis.

amatecha

Awesome! As soon as I saw "landmine-sniffing rat" I knew it must be Magawa!! He even has a book! https://www.albertwhitman.com/book/herorat/

Synaesthesia

Land-mines, particularly anti-personnel land minds are just horrible weapons. They should be banned.