Tiffany Wertheimer
BBC News
Tomorrow’s
Ronin, five years old, helped Cambodians recover land that were once avoided for fear of terrestrial mines
A detection rat of terrestrial mines in Cambodia has set a new world record to become the first rodent to discover more than 100 mines and other mortal war remains.
Ronin, a giant African pocket rat, has discovered 109 terrestrial mines and 15 elements of unploded ammunition since 2021, said Charity Apopo, which forms the animals, in a press release.
Cambodia remains strewn with millions of unexploded ammunition after about 20 years of civil war which ended in 1998.
Ronin’s “crucial work” Book Guinness said that Ronin’s “crucial work” makes a real difference for people who had to live with the “fear that a false step while going in their daily life could be their last”.
Apopo, based in Tanzania, currently has 104 recruits of rodents, or Herorats, such as the non -profit organization likes to call them.
The rats are trained to sniff chemicals found in land mines and other weapons abandoned on the battlefields. Due to their small size, rats are not heavy enough to explode the mines.
Rats can check an area the size of a tennis court in about 30 minutes, says the charity, while a human with a metal detector could take four days to erase the same land.
They can also detect tuberculosis, an infectious disease that commonly affects the lungs, much faster than it would in a laboratory using conventional microscopy, explains Apopo.
Tomorrow’s
It takes about a year to form each rat to detect unploded land mines
Ronin’s impressive work in the northern province of Cambodia Preah Vihear exceeded the previous record detainee Magawa, a rat that sniffs 71 mines and received a gold medal for its heroism in 2020.
Since the start of Apopo’s work 25 years ago, the organization has authorized 169,713 land mines and other explosives worldwide – more than 52,000 have been in Cambodia. The charitable organization also works in other countries affected by war, including Ukraine, South Sudan and Azerbaijan.
According to the Landmine, there are still four to six million terrestrial mines and other exploded ammunition buried in Cambodia.
