August 4, 2008

(Pet Pulse Photo Illustration by Mike Lloyd)

NEW YORK -– Dogs are the most well-known animal for their sniffing abilities, but various animals have the knack for uncovering hidden perils or outlawed goods.

The latest to join the ranks of life-saving, crime-stopping working animals are rabbit-sized rats in Mozambique.

Lead by rat handlers on thin leashes, the rodents will sniff around until they sniff out an explosive device. They will signal their discovery by scratching at the ground.

It’s a solution that’s part of a non-profit Belgian group’s effort to clear the country of thousands of land mines buried during Mozambique’s bloody civil war, which ended in 1992.

Now, Dennis Adams, a hostel owner, thinks tourists could be attracted to the unusual site of rats searching for explosives.

“People would come and see the rats work in the field with the trainers,” Adams said in an interview with The Georgia (British Columbia) Strait. “We could sell T-shirts, and the tourists could have their photos taken with them.”

The African giant pouched rat is ideal candidate for working in sub-Saharan Africa since it is resistant to the area’s diseases and can live up to eight years.

Bart Weejens trained about 250 rats, valued at about $5,000 to clear Mozambique’s mine fields.

He says the working rats have shown personalities as diverse as dogs, including characteristics of laziness, stubbornness and workaholics.

While the area is also known for its beaches and scuba diving, the explosive sniffing rats could bring another reason to visit the West African country.

But Mozambique is not the only country with a land mine problem that has been solved by animals, or in Croatia’s case, insects.

Inherited from the wars of the 1990s, Crotia and other countries born out of the former Yugoslavia, was facing more than 380 square miles of countryside contaminated by an estimated 250,000 mines.

“We started this because our citizens are exposed to serious risks with mines, said Professor Nikola Kezic of Zagreb University in an interview with BBC News. “Luckily we also have a long tradition of keeping bees and making honey. Our solution makes use of what we have.”

Kezic developed has worked to train his bees to detect any explosives that might have been missed by de-mining teams.

With the training only taking three to four days, Kezic places the bees in a large net tent where the feeding points are surrounded by soil tainted with explosive chemicals. The bees’ soon associate the explosive’s smell with food, so when they are released into an de-mined area they settle spots possibly containing land mines that the team missed.

In both cases of using rats and bees to search for land mines, these animals have an advantage over dogs as they are lighter and don’t risk setting off the explosive for which they search.

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BBC News, United Press International and GlobalPaw.com contributed to this article.