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The Rewarding System after a Landmine was indicated.
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A Giant African Pouch Rat learns to get rewarded to indicate the
location of explosives.
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A mine is found.
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The rodents have attractive qualities (2)
Different to dogs who get their drive to search for explosives out of
their stimulus to play, the rewarding system with rats works via food,
quite a good reason to work hard…
Apopo found many ways to make rats indicate explosives, but today the
project focuses on two approaches. One uses laboratory rats trained to
remotely analyse vapour strips (similar to the MEDDS system), the other
one trains the rodents to work in the minefield itself. MgM is the trial
partner for the “free-running” rats only. The test mine field
consists of hundreds of real landmines (without detonator!) of different
types buried at different times at different depths. An external marking
system clearly indicates the position of the mines in each box. Various
systems have been trialled in order to force the animals to search the
box systematically, the system MgM monitored in action showed some drawbacks
in handling, but the detection rates were an astounding 100%. The rats
slightly scratched the surface only and indicated this way exactly where
the mines were buried.
Although the achieved speed of 100 sqm in 30 minutes is substantially
slower than a dog, it still remains much faster than manual (human) clearance
by prodding/metal detector. Taking the costs in account, to beat the rather
expensive dogs in effectiveness, one simply uses more of the relatively
cheap pouch rats… Whereas these animals have proven their capacities
as such, Apopo claims it will take another two years until free-running
rats can be sent into MgM operations to work in parallel with the dog
teams. MgM are very much looking forward to this, as it is likely to be
an excellent tool for the quality control of cleared areas.
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