I would have thought that immaculately trained dogs would be the ones who would go ahead of a human trainer and use their highly sensitive noses to pinpoint the location of any potential landmines, but it seems that man’s best friend has a competitor in this particular department – rats. Yes, smelling a rat might take on a whole new meaning, as within a laboratory on the grounds of a police-guarded complex, there are 11 white-furred rats running around, hoping to impress trainers with their landmine identification abilities – with hopes of being on the receiving end of some sugar once they managed to get the job done, of course.
These rats are part of a training program to discover landmines which maim or even kill hundreds of people each year throughout Colombia. This government project has already been 5 years in action, and these are no ordinary sewer rats, but were specially bred to detect metals used in landmines. Hopefully this program will bring the fight to locating all the landmines around Colombia so that no more innocent lives will be lost due to accidents.
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