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PDSA / PA
Magwa has won a gold medal for finding mines in Cambodia
An African giant pouch rat has been awarded a prestigious gold medal for his work in detecting land mines.
Magawa has fired 39 landmines and 28 unexploded ordnance in his career.
The UK’s veterinary PDSA has presented him with its Gold Medal for “Life-saving Devotion to Duty in the Location and Clearance of Deadly Landmines in Cambodia”.
The Southeast Asian country is estimated to have six million landmines.
The PDSA Gold Medal is inscribed with the words “for animal heroism or devotion to duty”. Of the 30 animal recipients who received the award, Magwa is the first rat.
The seven-year-old rat was trained by the Belgian-registered charity Apopo, based in Tanzania, and has been known since the 1990s as an animal to detect landmines and tuberculosis – heroites. The animals are certified after one year of training.
“It’s really an honor to receive this medal,” Apopo chief executive Christophe Cox told the Press Association’s news agency. “But the people of Cambodia and all the people around the world who suffer from Mindmines are also big.”
On Friday, PDSA will broadcast the award ceremony on its website.
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According to Apopo, Magwa – born and raised in Tanzania – weighs 1.2 kg (2.6 lb) and is 70 cm (28 in) tall. While it is much larger than many other species of rodents, Magwa is still small and light enough that it does not trigger mines if it walks on it.
Rats are trained to detect chemical compounds inside explosives, meaning they ignore debris metal and can detect mines more quickly. Once they find an explosive, they scratch from the top to warn their human colleagues.
Megawa is able to find a tennis court-sized area in just 20 minutes – anything Ap Apo says will take a person with a metal detector between one to four days.
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It takes a year to train rats before they become certified land mine detectors, known as herorat
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Getty Images
Magawa and his colleagues are working with the Cambodian Mines Action Center to find an unexploded ordinance in the country.
He works only half an hour every morning and is approaching retirement age, but PDSA Director General Jane M. L. Clooflin said his work with Apopo was “truly unique and outstanding.”
“The work of begging directly saves and transforms the lives of men, women and children who are affected by these landmines,” he told the Press Association. “Every discovery he makes reduces the risk of injury or death for locals.”
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According to the Hello Trust’s mining-clearing NGO, Cambodia has had more than 64,000 casualties and about 25,000 boycotts since 1979 due to landmines. Many were killed during the country’s civil war in the 1970s and 1980s.
In January 2020, U.S. President Donald Trump protested against the sanctions imposed by President Barack Obama in 2014. The ban on landmine use was lifted.
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