Rat That Sniffs Out Land Mines Receives Award For Bravery (nytimes.com) 33
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The New York Times: The medal awarded on Friday lauded the "lifesaving bravery and devotion to duty" for work detecting land mines in Cambodia. Its recipient: a rat named Magawa.
Magawais the first rat to receive the award -- a gold medal bestowed by the People's Dispensary for Sick Animals, a British charity, that is often called the "animal's George Cross" after an honor usually given to civilians that recognizes acts of bravery and heroism. Not since the fictional Remy of the 2007 Disney-Pixar film "Ratatouille" has a rat done so much to challenge the public's view of the animals as creatures more commonly seen scuttling through sewers and the subway: Magawa has discovered 39 land mines and 28 pieces of unexploded ordnance, and helped clear more than 1.5 million square feet of land over the past four years.
More than five million land mines are thought to have been laid in Cambodia during the ousting of the Khmer Rouge and internal conflicts in the 1980s and 1990s. Parts of the country are also littered with unexploded ordnance dropped in United States airstrikes during the Vietnam War, a 2019 report from the Congressional Research Service found. Since 1979, more than 64,000 people have been injured by land mines and other explosives in Cambodia, and more than 25,000 amputees have been recorded there, according to the HALO Trust, the world's largest humanitarian land mine clearance charity.
Magawa, the most successful rat to have taken part in the program, was trained to detect TNT, the chemical compound within explosives. The ability to sniff out TNT makes him much faster than any person in searching for land mines, as he can ignore scrap metal that would usually be picked up by a metal detector. He can search an area the size of a tennis court in 30 minutes, whereas a person with a metal detector would usually take four days to search an area of that size. When he finds a mine, he signals to his handler by scratching at the earth above it. Unlike humans, Magawa is too light to detonate a mine, so there is minimal risk of injury.
More than five million land mines are thought to have been laid in Cambodia during the ousting of the Khmer Rouge and internal conflicts in the 1980s and 1990s. Parts of the country are also littered with unexploded ordnance dropped in United States airstrikes during the Vietnam War, a 2019 report from the Congressional Research Service found. Since 1979, more than 64,000 people have been injured by land mines and other explosives in Cambodia, and more than 25,000 amputees have been recorded there, according to the HALO Trust, the world's largest humanitarian land mine clearance charity.
Magawa, the most successful rat to have taken part in the program, was trained to detect TNT, the chemical compound within explosives. The ability to sniff out TNT makes him much faster than any person in searching for land mines, as he can ignore scrap metal that would usually be picked up by a metal detector. He can search an area the size of a tennis court in 30 minutes, whereas a person with a metal detector would usually take four days to search an area of that size. When he finds a mine, he signals to his handler by scratching at the earth above it. Unlike humans, Magawa is too light to detonate a mine, so there is minimal risk of injury.
That's not bravery. (Score:4, Insightful)
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He's Captain Amerata.
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it's doing what it was trained to do by it's human handlers.
Like most voters.
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Yes. But this rat is hugely useful. And any kind of award and medal is only in part for the one getting it, but also signal to the rest of the world. The second part is intact here. If this gets more rats into solving this problem, all the better.
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> That rat just wants some cheese
I like how this applies to the bomb sniffing rat for receiving an award AND Obama for receiving the Nobel peace prize.
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That rat just wants some cheese
Pedantic nitpick: The rats are rewarded with peanuts and bananas, not cheese. Cheese is actually unhealthy for rats.
he's just a rat.
Additional pedantic nitpick: He is not "just" a rat. He is a Southern Giant Pouched Rat [wikipedia.org], native to the savannah of East Africa.
How would you like to be described as "just" a primate?
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I saw footage of him on TV a couple of days ago. James Herbert didn't imagine rats that size!
I smell a rat (Score:2)
...and the rat smells mines.
His noble brethren.. (Score:1)
Re:His noble brethren.. (Score:5, Informative)
Lots of pigeons got medals in WWII
eg. "She flew 9 hours in bad visibility and heavy weather with strong headwinds. "
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
I guess (Score:4, Funny)
Defense contractors are working on developing land mines sensitive enough to detect (and dispose of) rats.
Until (Score:2)
Animaldot (Score:3)
Is this animal Slashdot today?
First crows, then cats, and now rats...
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Re: Animaldot (Score:2)
Stories these days need a human angle. That's why they feature animals.
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Dummer than a rat? (Score:2)
Should've been an award for luck (Score:2)
The United States is still (Score:5, Informative)
not a signatory to the anti-land mine treaty. We could do better.
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There is an obvious technical approach to designing ordnance that does not kill people for decades (or centuries) - a limited life detonation system.
Exploding bridge wire detonators do not use sensitive primary explosives and depend on a powerful discharge from a capacitor to detonate the device.When the battery goes dead the thing cannot explode. And if you engineer a small drain into the circuit (it will leak charge anyway, so an extra resistor may be unneeded) you can be assured that that battery will ge
I love Cambodia (Score:3, Interesting)
I love Cambodia; I've been there many times and it's a study in contrasts. Beautiful country, very poor, but an amazing, enriching place to visit.
As a guy, I have to say that the women there are stunning. Sooooo different than American women- they're actually nice, don't hold men in contempt, and don't view relationships as some sort of dominance contest. And did I mention that they're stunning? Really stunning.
I would literally be there right now attending a wedding, but Trump fucked up the response to COVID and now there's almost no country in the world we're allowed to land, including Cambodia. Unlike the US, Cambodia (a poor, 3rd-world country) managed to get its shit together and control the Trump Virus. They're basically back to normal in most respects.
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Beautiful country, very poor, but an amazing, enriching place to visit.
Maybe I should take a holiday there... [youtube.com]
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About a million years ago (give or take) I saw the Dead Kennedys playing live in some shithole bar in D.C.
They sucked so bad we thought they were a performance comedy act.
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I found Cambodia entirely full of life, albeit in constant risk of ending it - idiots kept running me over with their shitty mopeds.
I didn't spend enough time there to really get a feel for the culture and country and I must've been in the wrong bit of Cambodia for the women (although I'd just come from Vietnam, so my standards were high) but I definitely recommend it to anybody wanting a different view on life.
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"The trump virus" that TDS is a hell of a drug, huh?
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"The trump virus" that TDS is a hell of a drug, huh?
Yes, it turns gullible suckers into voters who will fall for any old shit spouted by a lying blowhard who pretends to be a billionaire.
It's called the "Trump Virus" because if not for his incompetent mishandling of the pandemic, no one would have ever heard of it. It would have been like Ebola, which Obama squashed before it got out of hand.
A useless medal instead of valuables (Score:3)
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probably
"probably"? The rat didn't even comprehend any of that fuss, and was - certainly - scared.