Rat magic

We have many flies around us in Mozambique.  Someone in the team asked one day in despair “what is the purpose of flies?”, I guess with a small hope that God should realise his mistake and instantly wipe all flies off the planet.  I can confirm that it did not happen and so I draw the conclusion that either God doesn’t exist or either flies does have a secret purpose.  However, one could also ask “what is the purpose of cockroaches?” or “what is the purpose of rats?”.  The answer to the last question I am now able to give you as rats recently have a been upgraded from a fairly useless animal that only could be used for cosmetic animal testing and occasionally feeding cats, to something highly valuable.

A couple of kilometres outside Inhambane is the rat training centre located and I had the pleasure of meeting one of the guys from there in a hotel bar.  He presented to me the “mine-sweeper rats”.  In a large training field, rats are taught to smell the chemicals in mines.  They can therefore be used to identify the location of land mines left since the civil war.  Mine sweeping is today an expensive, dangerous and time consuming task but is necessary as many children are killed or wounded by land mines each year.  New methods for mine-sweeping are developed all the time and trained rats is one of these methods.

And for all the animal activists, I should mention that the rats are not sacrificing their lives.  Land mines are designed to detonate when adults or children step on them and they can not be set off by small animals.  The rats are therefore only used to find the location of mines.

Impressed?  I thought so.  And I didn’t even have to mention the “rescue-rats” who can find people buried in demolished buildings after for example earthquakes or other major incidents.  Who knows what comes next.