Think search and rescue animal, and you’re likely to picture a dog. But now, researchers want you to imagine something else: the African giant pouched rat.
Think search and rescue animal, and you’re likely to picture a dog in an orange vest. But a Belgian nonprofit based in Tanzania wants you to imagine something else: the African giant pouched rat. Donna Kean and her colleagues at APOPO, a nonprofit that trains pouched rats to save lives, have spent the past 2 decades working with the curious animals to sniff out tuberculosis and track down land mines. Now, they’re moving on to search and rescue.
Donna Kean has spent the past 5 months training rats for search and rescue at APOPO’s research site in Tanzania.The giant pouched rats are endemic here in Tanzania, where we’ve had a land mine detection program with them for 20 years. We have all the training facilities in place, and we have amazing trainers who are local. APOPO’s mission is focused on humanitarian projects, so this is a great way to build local capacity. The first thing we did was train them to return to their starting point.
Then we trained the rats to pull a rubber ball on their backpack. The ball is attached to a microswitch, which emits a beep. In the real world, it would provide a signal to rescuers. When they were reliably doing that, we’d start introducing a target human. The goal is for the rat to go over to this mock victim, pull the ball, return to where they were released from when they hear the beep. Training started in August and is ongoing.
But you know, from all of my experience working with animals, they can always surprise you. So the ones that are not doing very well can all of a sudden be the ones that shape up and are top of the class. For search and rescue, dogs don’t penetrate debris, they just sniff around the outside of it. So the rats will only be deployed after human and canine search teams have already worked the debris site. We plan to release rats into debris sites from multiple entry points.
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