When I first approached people with the idea of using rats to find landmines they laughed at me. I spoke to the military in Belgium, where I’m from, and several other organisations but they said I was crazy.
It’s now been 11 years since we trained our first rat and we’ve used them to help clear more than eight million square metres of land, uncovering about 3,000 mines and more than 1,000 unexploded bombs. There are now more than 300 rats working in places like Gaza, Mozambique, Thailand and Angola. Their sense of smell is much more advanced than a dog’s, and they are much lighter and less likely to trigger a mine. We’ve never lost a rat in action — we call them Hero Rats.
They’re trained to identify the smell of landmine materials — TNT is the most common explosive. I begin by putting a rat in a cage with pockets of different smells and when it identifies TNT by scratching the earth above it, the action is rewarded with food. They quickly learn the process and keep coming back for more food.