Cambodia unveils statue to honour famous landmine-sniffing rat
bbc.com
bbc.com
> He spent a number of weeks mentoring 20 newly-recruited rats before ultimately retiring to a life of "snacking on bananas and peanuts".
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magawa
End to life worthy of being envied.
A few weeks ago when "Croatia declared free of landmines after 31 years" was posted here (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47189535), I rabbit holed wikipedia about landmine-sniffing animals. It's such a fascinating topic.
Put food in a maze and I’m sure rats would teach other rats how to get it. I expect this is similar.
Every trip to the park got us a few.
Then he ate one and have himself a bowel obstruction and me a great enthusiasm for pet insurance.
I have no expertise. His arguments sound very plausible though.
I do not think that the area would necessarily need to be cleared of debris first. Rats can get places people would never imagine they could quite easily.
What I did find to be consistent with rodents is the difficulty in getting them to use set search patterns and such. Rodents go where and how rodents go, and I've never found it possible to teach them set routes. They get a whiff and tend to go right at whatever they smelled in contrast to dogs who can be taught to take set routes/patterns.
The "distance from the nose" wouldn't matter. Rodents can often smell stuff that's around a mile away... a few inches of dirt (most landmines are under fewer than 25cm of dirt, anti-tank mines under fewer than 30cm) wouldn't be sufficient to deter them.
Reliably signaling humans depends upon the particular rodent. Rodents have personalities, and they will often make very particular signals to their people in response to particular things. Reliably enough to bet a life on it? Not sure, but I don't think they'd be terrible in that regard.
A rat taught to do a Westminster-style agility course including slalom cones:
https://imgur.com/gallery/smart-pet-rat-tofu-doing-fun-agili...
A rat driving a car. Not evidence of anything... just fun
2) Rats cannot be trained to move in a search pattern.
3) Rats have the capacity to detect explosive residue and can apparently be encouraged to do so with food rewards...
4) ...but there is no evidence that rats can respond to explosive residue in a hazardous area reliably.
5) There is no evidence that the method of deployment results in a thorough search of the area.
6) The speed of search sometimes claimed would make thorough search (tiny nose within 10 cms of target) physically impossible.
7) The cost of preparing the area where they are used, then dragging the rat back and forth over it has to be added to training and housing the rats.
8) While a rat may indicate on a hazard, it cannot expose and clear it. The cost of manually excavating and clearing any explosive hazard that the rat signals on must also be added to the total cost of clearance.
9) The ground has to be scalped for them to be dragged across it in a straight line, then safe-lanes for the handlers manually searched and cleared – so the total cost of using the rats includes the cost of an armoured vegetation cutter and a fully equipped demining team to prepare the area in which the rat will search.
10) There is absolutely no evidence that the cost is less than the cost of demining the area using the same assets but without rats.
11) Because the rat cannot be trained to search and indicate in a set way (which a dog can be reliably trained to do) there is no way for a Quality Assurance observer to know whether the rat is paying attention, so no way of knowing whether the rat has done anything of any value at all.
"
Ok, I only skimmed the article, but it sounded a bit forced. And already point 1 in the summary makes me sceptic, because rats can climb pretty well as far as I know. (Otherwise I am no expert, either)
"5. There is no evidence that the method of deployment results in a thorough search of the area."
This would be my main question here.
A cool story about a rat or a dog draws more attention than mines which were missed and maimed people years after searching the field.
Anyways, the author of that piece is a little mad, but in the sense that it is worth serious consideration. TLDR: the rats aren't cost effective and, worst of all, haven't scientifically proved to be effective.
In gladness and in safety,
May all beings be at ease.
Whatever living beings there may be;
Whether they are weak or strong, omitting none,
The great or the mighty, medium, short or small,
The seen and the unseen,
Those living near and far away,
Those born and to-be-born —
May all beings be at ease!
It's downright miraculous when we respect a non-human life enough to honor it like this
This rat will be remembered for longer than I will, that's for sure
Some antispeciesist (and others) argue that giving more compassion to animals is a step to develop one’s compassion to others being, hence being nicer to others humans. On the opposite: accepting an horrendous practices toward non-humans animals makes ones more prone to accept horrendous practice toward humans.
I was vegetarian for some years, before ultimately deciding I just run better on an omnivore diet. But for environmental and ethical reasons I decided to make meat more of a side dish vs the center of the meal, and to mostly eat chicken vs more high environmental impact animal proteins like beef.
I think a lot of people that would never go full vegan can do well on this sort of less meat middle road.
Ask a woman (or think about it if you are one) how they would like being forcefully impregnated then having their tits constantly milked, year after year. As a bonus, the born kids are separated into girls to be milked in the same cycle and boys to be killed and eaten.
Some people will get angry at you because you tried to do something good to much:
- not trying: that's ok, everybody is free to keep his life as-is
- trying 0-90%: that's ok, everybody is free to try doing some good
- trying 90-100%: you're a fundamentalist, you can't change the world
- "that's extremist" / "that's not natural" / [...] => That's an opinion, you won't change it. Smile and route to another subject.
- "why are you [an extremist/unnatural/priest/...]?" => Question. Don't try to rant the full manifesto, you won't change their opinion neither. But if you feel confortable you may clarify a few inches of incomprehension :
- Have you heard of vegansociety's definition[0]? I don't consider myself as an extremist.
- I find Tofu very tasty!
- I won't try to change your habits, just doing thinks the way I like them better.
0: https://www.vegansociety.com/go-vegan/definition-veganism
https://nautil.us/plants-feel-pain-and-might-even-see-238257
Real needle in a haystack stuff, wow
From Google, 2019,
https://research.google/blog/learning-to-smell-using-deep-le...
[0]: https://www.sentienceinstitute.org/us-factory-farming-estima...
Rats are so awesome, we just need to GMO them to live longer.
Also I love rats and totally agree they're tough pets because they don't live long enough. We had many of them growing up and spent a fortune removing tumors.
I thought rats would make great pets but the idea that you get attached to a guy who would die in a couple years is quite discouraging. You updated my knowledge.
My grandmother had an African grey parrot she had inherited from someone.
Nobody likes experimenting on animals, but it is use mice or orphans in third world countries. In silico and computational models are just not a good enough analogue for the human body.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monument_to_the_laboratory_mou...
So the hierarchy is
- our kids
- "third-world orphans"
- other species
For what it's worth, I'm not denying the benefit we obtain by testing on animals, nor am I suggesting that we live surrounded by rodents that we know to be vectors for multiple diseases that would affect us.
The comment above was merely an observation on the value of life and how little attention we pay to it.
We subject sentient beings to untold amounts of horror every day, and we are completely destroying the balance of life on earth with a system that is entirely devoted to serving humans--individual humans, not humanity.
The statue is not the point. The point is what this little creature did and how we might learn to show mercy and respect to our fellow sentient beings.
Source: recently finished getting rid of a rat infestation in my barn. they also reproduce at a crazy rate. Some poison + getting two barn cats = problem solved.
Part of these kinds of treaties is to accept some additional difficulty or expenses in defence for a more widespread benefit. I'm living in Finland and I would have accepted these.
I would not expect other countries to come to Finland’s aid if Finland had made such decisions.
But if that's the case, what are "all the force multipliers"? Chemical weapons? Biological weapons? What share of the GDP for defence?
I find some of the signatories laughable, as both sides in the Russia-Ukraine conflict have used them (with Ukraine being a signatory), while countries like Palestine and Eritrea have committed egregious human rights violations (since assenting), so I don't trust any commitment of theirs.
With respect to chemical and biological weapons, I think the reason they're not widely used is that they're relatively ineffective, and inconvenient, so I don't think they're a force-multiplier at all. Russia & Syria's (likely) uses of chemical weapons seem like more of a (mostly ineffective) desperate gamble than a brilliant move, though they demonstrate the non-existent consequences to such violations of treaty obligations.
International treaties tend to be always somewhat aspirational and are often violated and sparsely enforced. This does not mean they don't have any effect.
Personnel mines has been a topic of considerable public, political and military discussion about personnel mines in Finland for a long time and has been analyzed in depth. Even now, after a significant political mood change at around 2024, the official line (e.g. in the government proposal[1] that led to the withdrawal) is that personnel mines have mostly an auxiliary role in the defence strategy.
Note the incredible restraint of Ukrainians troops in dealing with Russian civilians and captured Russian military. But that does not translate into 'let's handicap our own forces'.
The warmongers are on the other side of the border. Europe is just reacting to this and the states that have rescinded the landmine ban are all directly in the line of fire.
The diplomatic effort to save over a million men from needless massacre on the battlefield was not considered worthwhile by the ruling elites running Ukraine for the past two decades, in face of the immense profits to be made - by an elite few - in war profits.
In the interest of figuring out whether you profit from war or not, why don't you tell us the extent of your own investment in the military industrial complex which currently profits from propagating the "ma' Russia" trope ..
This is at best a conjecture. It's arguable what terms are acceptable and to whom, but Russia has offered and is offering substantially milder terms than taking all of Ukraine. They probably wouldn't even want western Ukraine if offered.
In his own words: http://en.kremlin.ru/events/president/news/67828
>Immigrant to Europe
To me, this reads as a banal attempt at doxxing, since you have assumed yourself the position of arbiter of moral authority, which is being challenged by my assertions - but since you choose to frame things in this context, I can say with positive certainty that my cosmopolitan, multi-national, multi-language lifestyle, carried on over 4 decades, has well and truly led me to what I consider to be an elevated position: that all cultures are arbitrary and choose war instead of peace overtly, and often blindly.
The narrative that "all Russians are bad" or that "Russia can never be trusted" is as banal as the narrative - although equally 'true' - that "all Americans are bad" and that "America cannot be trusted", also. The simple fact of the matter is, I know plenty of great Russians. And Americans. And Iraqis', and Afghani's, and Kurds and Israeli's and Iranians and Egyptians and a few great Brits, a very hilarious Yemeni family (also immigrants), and a handfull of other wonderful people, on the other side of the _label_.
Russia and Ukraine are in the mess they are in because their arbitrary cultures are perpetuating the hatred, like you, instead of postulating peace and prosperity, like me.
The simple fact is, our current set of nations, equally human, is currently too incompetent to attain the wishes of the greater human entity, which exists well and truly beyond the sphere of those claiming that "mouthpieces of Russian propaganda" are something to be worrying about.
And the reason for that incompetence is, in my well-travelled and -spoken opinion, due to one factor only: the laziness of those who would use "those of another culture, over there", to manifest their own self-hatred. Because, as an American, you must surely, surely understand that there is a growing stack of reasons for the rest of the world to hate America right now - and yet, here we are, having a civil discussion about the state of things.
It is my learned opinion that there are no greater or lesser, more inferior or superior cultures - that all humans have the same constraints hefted upon them in greater or lesser magnitude, and those of us who have the freedom of expression and travel to maintain a multi-cultural, cosmopolitan lifestyle, must never submit to those incapable of escaping the propaganda and hubris of their own mono-culture.
All culture is a lie, which only persists in the re-telling. "Russians are evil" and "Americans are evil" are lies, persisted by those who re-tell them, designed to keep Russians and Americans from doing great things, together.
And if you think this isn't applicable, in every single human case tested so far, then you need to travel more. And not as a tourist: as a local.
It's the only way to be sure you know what you're talking about with regards to world affairs...
Ukraine certainly could have chosen to accept Russia's demands, but the demand was essentially the extinguishment of soverign Ukraine, and the extinguishment of Ukrainian identity. At least, those were the demands I saw.
Not a lot of diplomatic room. Also, Ukraine had engaged diplomatically with Russia in the past, but it turns out there's no mechanism for Ukraine to enforce treaties that Russia signed.
This closely mirrors the actions of Russians in the 1940s against a number of countries in Eastern Europe. Exterminate doctors-lawyers-merchants to destroy natural leaders, and then exploit the working class people as slaves to the immigrant class of Russian masters. This is the blueprint of how Russia has grown from a small city-state to span 11 timezones. The parent poster mentioned banality several times. It's utterly banal to believe that you can smooth talk your way out of this.
As much as the poster criticizes Western attitudes, they end up reproducing one of the most characteristic ones: the belief that every conflict can be managed through negotiation and that there is always some mutually acceptable deal to be made. This reflects the Anglo-American bubble and bias toward materialism, which leads to serious misjudgements when applied to situations where motivations other than economic.
Which is to say, your "What Russia Should Do with Ukraine" is just a projection of the, indeed very materialist, "Project for a New American Century" - so shall we castigate all Americans for callously allowing such totalitarian schemes to have been committed, in their names?
Your agitation against Russia is the kind of smooth talking that gets people into conflict, not out.
Regardless, let us not ignore the statistics for "# of states considered inferior by ones own states' ruling elite and thus qualified for destruction and then actually destroyed", per-state, shall we .. the OP is right to point out the sheer magnitude of crimes when comparing Russia vs. Western-5-eyes states...
I would like to see which would be your opinion about Russians if you had the luck to live in a place close to them, so you would have seen your family kidnapped and sent to forced work in Siberia and everything they owned stolen from you.
This is something that the Russians have done everywhere around them, whenever they could, and it was always done unprovoked, before any of those neighbors had done anything against them. When those attacked by Russia during WWII have fought back, after Russia was among the victors, with the help of USA and UK Russia has extracted huge "war reparations" from those who have fought against the Russian aggression, besides transforming all the Eastern European countries into vassal states.
The traditional joke about Russia was: "Who are the neighbors of Russia? ... Whoever Russia wants."
So there is no wonder that anyone whose memories are intact will do anything to prevent the Russians from repeating such actions.
Wikipedia says:
> What Russia Should Do with Ukraine" (Russian: Что Россия должна сделать с Украиной, romanized: Chto Rossiya dolzhna sdelat s Ukrainoy),[a][1] is an article written by Timofey Sergeytsev and published by the Russian state-owned news agency RIA Novosti.[2] The article calls for the full destruction of Ukraine as a state, as well as the full destruction of the Ukrainian national identity in accordance with Russia's aim to accomplish the "denazification" of the latter.
Sounds like Wikipedia describing an Russian source. I can't read Russian, can you? Is the description of the source inacurate? Is the summary inacurate?
In which documents, please? I would like to see for myself where Russia demands the extinguishment of sovereign Ukraine, that's bound to be interesting language.
> “I have said many times that I consider the Russian and Ukrainian people to be one nation. In this sense, all of Ukraine is ours,” Putin said, according to Sky News.
> To me, this reads as a banal attempt at doxxing
You extensively comment on your history on HN when it suits you, and then you balk when that history is quoted and claim this is 'doxxing'? Sorry, but that's not how this works. Either you keep your history off HN or you can expect it to be quoted back at you when inconvenient.
> I can say with positive certainty that my cosmopolitan, multi-national, multi-language lifestyle, carried on over 4 decades, has well and truly led me to what I consider to be an elevated position: that all cultures are arbitrary and choose war instead of peace overtly, and often blindly.
Having lived in a few countries and always leaving those countries with a negative attitude (as you are doing now with Europe) sketches a very shallow level of engagement. You don't have an elevated position, you just believe you do and your comments here are testimony to how far off the mark you are.
> The simple fact is, our current set of nations, equally human, is currently too incompetent to attain the wishes of the greater human entity, which exists well and truly beyond the sphere of those claiming that "mouthpieces of Russian propaganda" are something to be worrying about.
They are something to worry about: they serve in Putin's army of useful idiots, and you are currently behaving like one of those.
> And the reason for that incompetence is, in my well-travelled and -spoken opinion
You can travel a lot and speak well but still spout nonsense.
> Because, as an American
Oh, this is hilarious.
> It is my learned opinion
You are coming across as someone who knows it all but fails to see the most basic stuff, that detracts from all of your other points.
> "Russians are evil" and "Americans are evil" are lies
Obviously they are, but I wasn't making any arguments along those lines. I know some fine Russians and I have more friends in the US than in Europe. I too have traveled a bit and spent some time abroad. It doesn't make me feel like I found the stone of wisdom and it certainly did not make me feel like I was qualified to start pissing on the cultures and leadership of the places that I've lived.
> And if you think this isn't applicable, in every single human case tested so far, then you need to travel more.
Because I haven't traveled enough? Or because we disagree and you think that by putting up some arbitrary bar you can pretend that you have the moral high ground?
> And not as a tourist: as a local.
Well, you are not a tourist: you are now a local. So we get to hold you to a higher standard than some random commenter.
> It's the only way to be sure you know what you're talking about with regards to world affairs...
Unbelievable. Anyway, I've yet to see such a pompous pile of junk on HN, you are dangerously misinformed and on top of that you come across as if you have achieved some level of enlightenment that gives you the right to pontificate to the lesser folks you interact with. I would suggest a more humble stance, one where you stop assuming that you know it all and start with actually listening a bit more.
I'm a pacifist at heart, but I also understand that if your country is attacked that you will defend it, and it is very clear who the aggressor is here and that there was no diplomatic solution other than to end up with Ukraine as a sovereign nation utterly destroyed. Russia (note: Russia, not Russians) has proven to be an utterly untrustworthy party to deal with at the diplomatic level. Their betrayal of Ukraine is horrific, mass murder, rape, daily attacks on civilians and civilian infrastructure. Many, many people dead, wounded and mentally destroyed for life. And here you are from your safe house in Vienna telling them that they should have engaged in more diplomacy? Unbelievable.
You like to travel? Good, I challenge you to go visit Ukraine and to spend some time there and befriend people, talk to them and get some actual perspective on this conflict. Then afterwards, you can go to Russia and do the same there. You will certainly come away with a slightly different point of view than what you have right now and since you feel the need to tell me to travel more (which is hilarious) I think it is fair for me to do the same to you.
I shouldn't expect its citizens to be anything less than war-mongers, nor should I be surprised at the passive-aggress vitriol that gets triggered into being manifested at the moment their 'authority' is questioned. Such is life in a totalitarian-authoritarian society, such as America today.
After all, this is the nation that actively supported the worlds latest genocide and which refuses to prosecute its own war criminals, leaving the rest of the world to do it ..
I am genuinely curious what you mean by this exactly? Do you see Finland as being led by warmongers?
Russia is not even the worlds #1 source of war-mongering, by a long shot. (The UK and the USA are, having murdered millions of innocent human beings since 2003 in multiple different theatres - countries and cultures deemed inferior by Western, fundamentalist, racist, ruling elites...)
I am not Russian, and can thus do nothing effective about Russia. I am a subject of the criminal 5-eyes western alliance which has murdered millions of innocent human beings since 2003, however, and I no longer believe in Western moral authority which gives us the imperative to 'do something about their war criminals' without "first taking care of our own war criminals", because we have far, far more heinously evil individuals still running the show with bloodied hands and with massive war crimes and crimes against humanity to answer for - yet we do nothing while bleating about Putin.
That goes back MUCH further than 2003.
> because we have far, far more heinously evil individuals still running the show with bloodied hands and with massive war crimes and crimes against humanity to answer for -
On this we agree, so what are you doing about it?
> yet we do nothing while bleating about Putin.
Yes, because Putin is currently waging a war of aggression against a much smaller nation which also matters.
The fact that there is more than one thing wrong with the world does not give you leeway to only see the one and ignore the other. Western leadership has often been found on the wrong side of many conflicts and the same goes for the current Russian leadership. But since you've chosen to throw your lot in with us Westerners we still sort of expect you to show some solidarity rather than to start carrying water for at least one enemy. Just so we can hold things together long enough to address all of those wrongs.
Europe has problems, there is no doubt about it. But it also has learned a lot of every expensive lessons and has the scars to prove that. You have yet to integrate or understand those lessons and yet you lecture us as though you've been invited to educate us poor backwards denizens with your superior insight. But all you've done is show the limits of your own understanding, of the history of the content, of how things go to where they are and how we are collectively trying very hard to improve things, which is hard and slow work.
A relatively small fraction of West-Europeans has visited the countries east of the line Berlin-vienna-Rome. In that sense Europe is more like two continents than one. In a nutshell, your viewpoint appears to be 'not my problem'. And I don't doubt it isn't your problem, you have no roots here and can pack up any day with your Australian passport to find a new home. But we actually live here and even though some of us have traveled as much (or maybe even more as you did) as you have and/or have lived in many different countries (which on HN isn't nearly as exceptional as you seem to think).
When you immigrate you accept that the country you immigrate to isn't perfect. But you do make a statement of loyalty, the country that accepts you accepts you with all your flaws and that's a two way street. You don't get to pretend you're some kind of alien from outerspace that expects the people around you to start living according to your ridiculously high and impractical standards. Because theory is fine, of course. The problem is that we don't live in your theoretical world where all conflict can be solved diplomatically so that nobody's holy houses and material gains get upset. Sometimes you really do get invaded, and sometimes you have to fight.
The country that I'm from has a long, long history of abuse that made us fabulously wealthy. This is not something to be proud of. At the same time it got invaded many times and somehow we managed to ultimately fight off the invaders or outsiders fought them off for us. I have no illusions about our leadership, but at the same time, when looking at the various alternatives it could be a lot worse. The last thing I would think of as an immigrant is to lecture the locals on how they should run their affairs. I would be the outsider and it would be up to me to learn, not lecture.
Animals are awesome, land mines are not. I hope we can avoid ever bringing that to our shores. Sadly, I know we now have air-mines (drones) so guess someone has to come up with drone sniffing pidgins or something (though obviously a parked drone probably doesn’t persist as long as a buried stationary mine and a flying drone less so).
War sucks.
For those reasons their effectiveness is limited.
A few km up the same road is the Cambodian Landmine Museum that has a couple of demo gardens where one can spectacularly fail find Lamdimes Found like 10 amd they were like one hundred, 2 right next to me…. Unfortunately that place which is run by a person called Aki Ra although having done a lot more work gets less financing.
Others have statues of cats.
And others have statues of a mad clown king. To each their own.
We here have a few old statues mostly from people who won in "glorious wars". While the statues look ok (though, aged), at one point in time I wondered why we glorify these folks. I then concluded that statues showing humans is a rather outdated concept, IMO. Some of this is history though, but it is still outdated.
For all of the recipients. Tearing up a bit reading stories of courage that will never get the same recognition just because they weren't born a human.
Japanese researchers have already successful in detecting sub-surface bamboo shoots for culinary, because young bamboo shoot underneath the ground taste better than apparent overground ones.
Let's invent a landmines detection robotic device namely MAGAWA for Mines Apparatus Ground Assessment Waveform Analysis.
But it takes humans to decide how much work we're going to make for ourselves.
No one likes those shitty kids that keep making messes because they are entitled or angry.