Super Rat: the record-setting rodent sniffing out landmines and saving lives | Hacker News Reader

Super Rat: the record-setting rodent sniffing out landmines and saving lives

cnn.com

35 pointswallflower14 comments

Genuine question here, but why not use dogs for this? Is it because dogs might be too heavy and trigger a mine? What is the activation weight of a landmine?

Depends on the mine design but generally you need to be able to apply somewhere around 4-5PSI to the trigger to set one off. General designs are made to be buried after arming so it wouldn't do to have a very light trigger mechanism.

Because rats will keep at it for longer. These particular rats are probably bigger than some tiny dogs, but a rat is a forager, so it can be motivated to keep this up for hours. This behaviour is not so close to what a dog needs to do to eat, so it would do it to please but lose motivation eventually.

Well that's what I remember reading some years ago anyway. I guess a dog would keep going if you made a fuss of him, but you don't want to go over to the middle of the minefield to do that.

But dogs are trained to sniff truffles and definitely stick to it for long, and the process (sniff around, signal to handler, get reward, repeat) seems the same.

But are there more truffles in a forest than there are mines in a minefield?

I'm not sure, I remember going truffle hunting (a grand-uncle owned truffle dogs) and spending a whole morning not finding anything.

Luckily, I never had to go mine-hunting.

Well, that's just what I read...

I'm no longer sure it is accurate. Looking at their website APOPO now actually use dogs as well. They say that rats and dogs are complementary, but they give an advantage of the dogs but not of the rats

Also, I ran across this article criticising the rats effectiveness: https://nolandmines.com/APOPO%20rats.html . I have no way to assess it's accuracy.

A previous article said they only work the rats for 30 minutes a day.

Small mammals typically don't have a lot of endurance. Dogs and humans are kind of outliers there, as we specifically evolved for persistence hunting.

It's probably just due to mass and ease of training.

Rats a cheaper. How did an Army K9 officer tell me? Rats are much cheaper, but nobody wants to be a rat leader...

But the way: The landmines very likely contain TNT. But this is not what the rat detects. Landmines don't smell like TNT...

The logistics of the rats are cheaper. But the cost basis is probably always going to be the trainers. A trainer's time is much more costly than a dog's needs.

no idea where to find it again or how accurate it is but i watched a documentary about these rats some years ago and it said that they're small enough to be able to navigate minefields without triggering the mines.

a well known Ukranian dog - a small breed one https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patron_(dog)

>What is the activation weight of a landmine?

Several kilograms. Children trigger the mines. So a large or a medium dog would usually too.

Given the amount of work to be done after the current war, i'd bet on mass use of flying and ground drones with bomb detectors.

Pretty much. Furthermore, investment is much smaller, upkeep much lower, transportation easier. And since rats live faster, and shorter, lives, you can get new batch of mine detector rats sooner than you would with dogs. Even under optimal conditions.

This means that if something bad happens, say death of multiple animals due to disease or unfortunate accident. The replacement can arrive much sooner.

The downside is that you have to replace them much more often. But the positives outweigh negatives.

You can use bees too https://www.bbc.com/news/business-56344609

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