What's so heroic about them? You'd have to ask the untold hundreds of people around Africa and Southeast Asia that these rats have saved from one of the deadliest scourges of modern warfare - landmines. The rats are trained to patrol potential minefields, sniffing out the buried booby-traps. The rats themselves are too light to set the mines off, so there's no risk of them being blown up. Instead, they can alert their human handlers to the danger, which allows their partners to dig up and deactivate the mines. The program is led by the nongovernmental organization APOPO.
If that wasn't impressive enough, the rats are also demonstrating their ability to save lives in other ways. They can sniff out Tuberculosis, one of the deadliest diseases around the world, identifying symptoms in local clinics, which can help reduce the risk of it spreading. it costs less to train a rat than a dog, and the rats are actually more accurate, with fewer false-positives detected.
The rats taking up residence in PDZA flunked out of their training academy, but that doesn't mean that they aren't still making a difference. Instead of working in the field, they are helping to educate visitors about the important work that APOPO does around the world to save people from landmines and Tuberculosis. They even do a few demonstrations, in which the stakes are thankfully lower than they are in the field. Perhaps some of those people who they help educate may reach out to APOPO to adopt a rat, paying for its training and care.
It's a great story of resilience, the power of training, an the importance of conserving every species, even those that we may not think of us as highly glamorous or majestic. Every species has a part to play, and even a rat may change the world for the better.
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