Experts train rats to sniff out African landmines

IMPORTING of giant pouched rats was banned in the United States after the exotic animals were blamed for the spread of monkey pox — but back home in Africa the animals are being trained for humanitarian work...sniffing out land mines.

In their little red, black and blue harnesses, they look like miniature sniffer dogs. But their trainers at Tanzania's Sokoine University of Agriculture say the African pouched rats can do a much better job than dogs and all for a bit of banana.

"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 co-ordinator of a project that is training 300 rats to locate mines by recognising the smell of dynamite and TNT.

The African rats roused fears about the importing of exotic pets into the United States last April after it was discovered that the virus causing monkeypox had probably jumped from the rats, which had been shipped from Ghana, to the prairie dogs with whom they shared cages in trendy pet shops.

At least 75 people in the US Midwest are believed to have contracted monkeypox from their pet prairie dogs in the first recorded outbreak of the disease in the US. The importation of the rats has since been banned.

But Cox says he knows of no connection between the rats in Tanzania and the outbreak of disease in the US. "We have had no incident of sickness related to the rats here," he said.

Not everyone, however, is as admiring of the rats as their trainers. Local farmers in the region, 100 miles west of the capital, Dar es Salaam, look on the rats as pests.

"People are happy when I tell them I am working with the rats because they think I will help to eliminate them," project vet Mwambewe Martin said. "But when I tell them I am training them, they don't understand how rats can be trained."

Despite their description as "giant" rats, the animals can detect mines because they are small enough about 30 inches long, weighing about 3lb to scamper across a minefield without setting off the charges.