KAMPALA: A Belgian research project for detecting landmines, using specially trained sniffer rats, will be launched next week when the first batch of rodents are sent on their first assignment to Mozambique.

African giant pouched rats were trained over three years to sniff out explosives at a test site in Tanzania. They spent two months in field trials among heavily mined areas of Mozambique along the banks of the Limpopo. The project coordinator, Christophe Cox, said: “The results we got back from the field trials were encouraging. The rats will probably be deployed about Friday next week.”

Scientists involved in the project said that rats were in many ways better mine-hunters than dogs: “They learn quicker and do not get so personally attached to the owner, so they’re easier to transfer to another trainer,” said Mr Cox.

Researchers also said rats, being lightweight, were easier to transport and less likely to set off mines accidentally. “Their noses are closer to the ground, so they can operate in an area of high mine density where a dog may be confused,” said Bartes Weetjens, who thought of the idea eight years ago after recalling that the rodents he bred as a childhood hobby had an acute sense of smell.

On detecting a mine, the rats scratch at the ground, and are then rewarded with a piece of banana. The rats will be deployed, at a time, over 38km belts of suspected minefields.

It is estimated that impoverished Mozambique, with a land mass three times that of the UK, is riddled with about 500,000 landmines, the legacy of a 16-year civcivil war that pitted Mozambique’s Marxist rulers against rebel forces sponsored by South Africa’s apartheid regime.

The United Nations believes that since 1980, 9,000 Mozambicans, mostly civilians, have been victims of landmines laid by both sides of the war. If the de-mining is successful, the rats could be deployed in other mine-infested areas, such as Sudan or Cambodia..—Dawn/The Guardian News Service.