HeroRATS

(adapted from an article in the October National Geographic)

Some people cringe when they see a rat but Bart Weetjens smiles. A Belgian product designer, Weetjens devised a way for these often reviled rodents to help solve a global problem: how to locate land mines, some 60 million of which are scattered in 69 countries.

Dogs are often deployed to sniff them out, "but I knew rats were easier to train," says Weetjens, who bred them as a boy. Rats are also light, so they don't detonate the minesthey find; they stay healthy in tropical areas too, where many of the explosives are buried; and they're cheap to breed and raise.

In the late 1990's Weetjens chose the African giant pouched rat, with its very sensitive nose, for Pavlovian training: if the rats scratched the ground when they sniffed TNT, they got a reward.

More than 30 trained sniffer rats, aka HeroRATS, have started sweeping minefields in Mozambique, where they've cleared almost a quarter square mile. Weetjens also trains rats to screen human saliva for tuberculosis and is mulling new missions, such as finding earthquake victims in rubble. Lives saved, health improved, mines defused__ nothing to cringe about here.