Just nine months after being awarded the highest British animal order for bravery, the landmine sniffer rat Magawa retires. The Gambia giant hamster rat, originally from Tanzania, had helped clean up a 225,000 square meter area of mines during her five-year career as a sniffer, according to the Belgian aid organization Apopo.
He is still in good health. But after tracking down a total of 71 landmines and 38 unexploded explosive devices, the small rodent became “a little tired,” Apopo program director in Cambodia, Michael Heiman, told AFP news agency. A life as a pensioner is now the best for him.
With his hit rate, the little rodent is the most successful rat of the Belgian organization that had also trained him. The rat can search an area the size of a tennis court for mines within half an hour. With a metal detector, this would take four days. Magawa himself is too light to trigger a mine.
Once the rodent has discovered an explosive device, it scrapes its paws into the ground to draw the attention of the mine defusers. He is rewarded with bananas and peanuts. He will continue to receive his favorite foods as a pensioner.
For his extraordinary services, Magawa was awarded the gold medal of the non – profit British animal organization PDSA last September-the counterpart of the British George’s Cross for Human Heroes.
In retirement, Magawa will live in the same cage as before, following the same daily routine, an Apopo spokeswoman said, according to the AP news agency. But he will not go to the minefields anymore. He gets time to play every day, as well as regular exercise and health checks. For 20-30 minutes a day he is let into a larger cage with sandbox and impeller.
Apopo employs dozens of clever rodents in Africa and Asia to search for landmines and sniff out tuberculosis. According to the organization, only recently 20 newly trained landmine sniffer rats arrived in Cambodia. It will be a great challenge for them to succeed Magawa. “He’s a very extraordinary rat,” Heiman said. “Of course we will miss him during the missions.«
