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A rat has a well developed sense of smell that is comparable to
a dog’s. By contrast, however, rats are in general less demanding
than dogs, less prone to illness and very easy to train. Also, there
are animal researchers who believe to have found proof that rats
can pass on trained knowledge through genetic information within
a few generations. Trained to sense explosives and bred for their
training to be genetically transferred, such self-reproducing explosive
sensors could revolutionize the work of MgM and many others…
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The Apopo Team and MgM Director H.Ehlers in a briefing.
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The breeding centre.
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The rodents have attractive qualities (1)
Dogs used as Explosive Detection Dogs (EDDs) in humanitarian mine clearance
have proven to be quite prone to illness and only able to work intensely
for a few hours in a day. As a result, other animals that may be useful
for the purpose have been (and are being) investigated. Compared with
pigs, mungos, butterflies and cockroaches, MgM is convinced that especially
trained laboratory rats could be a useful alternative. Of course, these
animals have to be integrated into a useful chain of events – a safe
operating system – you can’t just let them loose in an area
where they may be mines.
A South-African company, MECHEM, developed a procedure where air over
a suspect area is sucked into a filter via a pump. The location where
the sample originated is recorded by GPS and then the samples are analyzed
thousand of kilometers away on neutral territory by explosives detecting
dogs. So one dog working just a few hours a day is no longer restricted
to checking 2 km of road. A dog is able to check samples that represent
20 km of road, 20 meters wide from which the samples have been taken.
And several other dogs are used to check the same samples and act as a
confirmation of each other’s performance. Unfortunately this revolutionary
method is very expensive and labor intensive. In order to produce dependable
results, the collection and separation of the air samples has to be conducted
under strictly controlled and pure conditions by highly trained specialists.
So the procedure and its complicated logistics cannot be easily transferred
to another organizations in a different scenario.
But the principle of air probes, or scent analysis could possibly be deployed
successfully in another, less expensive and demanding operating system
– and with other animals.
In September 2001 the Management of MgM went to see the progress of the
APOPO Mine Sniffing Rats Programme in Tanzania.
Like with a number of other R&D projects, MgM was chosen to function
as field partner for this ground breaking approach of feasible explosive
vapour detection. A large number of different types of rats are bread
and trained for different purposes.
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