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The rats underwent a year-long training before receiving certificates demonstrating their ability to detect landmines.
A large African rat with a food storage bag received a prestigious gold medal for its work in detecting landmines.
The rat, named Magawa, through its sense of smell, discovered 39 landmines and 28 munitions buried during its lifetime.
A UK veterinary charity called the People’s Dispensary for Sick Animals (PDSA) awarded the Rat a gold medal for his dedication to his duty of saving lives at deadly landmine clearance sites in Cambodia.
There are believed to be around 6 million landmines in Southeast Asia.
The PDSA gold medal is inscribed “For Animal Courage or Dedication to Duty.”
The Magawa is the first rat to win this medal among the thirty animals it has won so far.
The 7-year-old rodent rat has received training by the Belgian registered Abobo Charitable Society and has practiced its activities in Tanzania and has been raising animals, known as Hero-Rat after completing the training, with the aim of discovering landmines and tuberculosis since the 1990s. the last century. Each animal that completed its training course is awarded.
“Having this medal is a real honor for us. But it is also a great thing in Cambodia, and for all the people of the world who suffer from landmines,” Christophe Kos, executive director of the charity Abobo, told the agency. news Press Association English.
On Friday, the PDSA broadcast the medal ceremony for the Magawa Rat on its website.
Born and raised in Tanzania, the Magawa rat weighs 1.2 kilograms (2.6 pounds) and is 70 centimeters (28 inches) long, according to the Abobo charity. Although this rat is much larger than the other types of rats, it is still small and light in such a way that it does not explode mines if it passes over it.
Rats are trained to detect a chemical compound inside explosives, which means they ignore scrap and can search for mines faster. When rats detect an explosive, they scratch the top of the explosive to alert their co-workers.
And the Magawa rat can search a field the size of a tennis court in 20 minutes. The Apollo charity says this would save time knowing that the metal detector requires between one and four days to do its job.
And this rat works half an hour a day every morning, but is nearing retirement age. PDSA CEO Jane McLaughlin said her work with Abobo was “truly unique and extraordinary.”
“What Magawa does protects and directly changes the lives of the men, women and children who have been affected by these landmines. Every discovery he makes reduces the risk of injury or death to the local population,” he told the Press Association.
Hello Trust, a non-governmental mine action NGO, says Cambodia has recorded more than 64,000 casualties and some 25,000 mine amputees since 1979.
Many of these mines were laid during the country’s civil war in the 1970s and 1980s.
In January 2020, US President Donald Trump lifted restrictions that had been placed on the use of US landmines and lifted a ban imposed in 2014 by former US President Barack Obama on their use.
