Animal of the week|African giant rats have been used for demining and chasing smugglers
The summary is made by artificial intelligence and checked by a human.
Savanna hamster rat is a versatile and useful animal.
Rats have worked as minesweepers and now they are being trained as customs officers.
The Apopo organization trains rats in Tanzania.
Customs dogs are a familiar sight, but what would a customs rat sound like?
It would have a little official vest and it would sniff luggage. Then it would jerk its paws at a small alarm hanging around its neck to let it know that something suspicious had been found.
There may soon be such. Savannah hamster rat (Cricetomys gambianus) has proven to be a very versatile and universally useful animal.
These African giant rats have been rehabilitated for years as, for example, mine sweepers, and now they are being trained as a kind of customs officials.
His name according to this rat-like creature lives in the savanna and like a hamster it stores food in its cheek pouches.
It is known that it can cram so many dates into its cheeks that it can barely fit back into its nest hole. It’s not actually related to our local rats, but it’s still a long-tailed rodent. A big one, about the size of a hare.
The hamster rat’s precise nose and general foresight have been observed in Tanzania, where an NGO called Apopo has been training these sniffers since the turn of the millennium.
Rats have been used as deminers in old war zones, such as in Cambodia, where a “hero rat” named Magawa helped clear a total of 42 old mines in front of soccer fields.
The rat smells the explosives and can walk around without worry, because its weight is not enough to trigger the mine.
So, those customs rats. Now it is in a new study demonstrated that rats can be trained to sniff out illegal animal goods such as ivory and anthill scales. In the future, the linetails could scare poachers.
The advanced animals also know how to smell the mucus sample of a tuberculosis patient, and they are also trained as ruin rats, to find people in need. So a true all-rounder!
However, the rat has to do quite a lot of day shifts. In nature, it is a nocturnal animal.
However, rodents have pretty good employment and pension benefits. At the rats’ home camp in Tanzania, the animals are fed a total of 25,000 bananas, 6,200 avocados and a thousand kilograms of nuts each year, says news channel NPR.