1 September 2025

Many animals work for humans including sniffer dogs who use their sense of smell to detect explosives and illegal drugs. Landmine fields make land unusable in many parts of the world and can be too dangerous for dogs to work in because their weight can set off the explosives. The APOPO organization in Tanzania has the answer: Southern giant pouched rats.

Native to southern Africa, the southern giant pouched rat (Cricetomys ansorgei) weighs 2.6-4.4 pounds and is 28-31 inches from nose to tail tip. This is large for a rat but lightweight compared to a sniffer dog. Though he cannot see well he has an excellent sense of smell and is quite trainable. All he needs is a banana reward to keep on sniffing. Sometimes he gobbles it up and stores it in the very large cheek pouches that gave him his name.

Called HeroRATs by APOPO: “A HeroRAT can search an area the size of a tennis court in 30 minutes – a human deminer with a metal detector can take up to 4 days.”

Cambodia has one of the highest landmine concentrations in the world left over from the Vietnam War, their civil war, the Khmer Rouge, and continuing civil strife. These videos tell the story of HeroRATs in Cambodia.

The HeroRAT “mine sweeps” by running transects across the suspect area. When he detects a landmine, he lightly scratches the ground above it to signal to his handler that he’s found something. (No landmines in this video.)

HeroRATs have also been taught to detect tuberculosis in sputum (100 samples in 20 mins instead of 4 days) and poached animal parts in illegal wildlife trafficking.

Just recently a team of HeroRATs trained to find humans trapped under earthquake rubble has been stationed in Turkey.

Read more at APOPO: We Train Rats to Save Lives.

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p.s. The acronym APOPO comes from Dutch: Anti-Persoonsmijnen Ontmijnende Product Ontwikkeling = Anti-Personnel Landmines Detection Product Development