Giant Rat Detects Mine and Tuberculosis

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Nicholas Kristof, The Giant Rat That Save Lives; Innovating in philanthropy with the help of rodents. New York Times, Apr 19, 2015.
www.nytimes.com/2015/04/19/opini ... hat-save-lives.html

Quote:

"This is a Gambian pouched rat, a breed almost 3 feet from nose to tail, the kind of rat that gives cats nightmares.

"the rats scamper along on leashes. They respond only to the scent of explosives, so scrap metal doesn’t slow them down. At this minefield, which is full of metal objects, a human with a metal detector [will be slowed by metals that does not contain explosives and] can clear only about 20 square meters a day. A rat can clear 20 times as much.

"The rats are paid in bananas, peanuts, avocados and apples, and they don’t need body armor — partly because they’re too light to set off land mines. (They can still weigh up to 2.5 pounds, which is a lot of rat when you’re face to face.)

"Bart Weetjens, a Belgian product designer, started the HeroRat program after puzzling about how to improve mine detection.

"They [these rats] are called 'pouched' not because they are marsupials but because they fill their cheeks with nuts and other goodies, and then bury them underground — relying upon scent to recover their caches later. Another advantage of Gambian pouched rats is that they have an eight-year life span that offers a lengthy return on the nine months of training needed to detect land mines.

"The rats work only a couple of hours a day (they get hot in midday), and they retire at age 6 when they become less dependable.

My comment:
(a) Years ago I knew the outline of this story (first about detecting mines, then about sniffing out tuberculosis sputa), except that this is a giant rat.

* The plural form of the English noun “sputum” is “sputa” because it (sputum) was originally Latin.
(b) Angola
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angola
(Capital  Luanda; Independence from Portugal in 1975, after a war that started in 1961)

(c)
(i) Gambian pouched rat
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gambian_pouched_rat
(Cricetomys gambianus;
(ii) Gambia is Angola's eastern neighbor.
(iii)
(A) Wikipedia has a page "cheek pouch" but after reading it, I still do not know how it works.
(B) Golden Hamsters' Amazing Cheek Pouches; X-rays show how golden hamsters store incredible amounts of food in their cheek pouches that can stretch all the way back to their hips. Pets-Wild at Heart. BBC, Jan 14, 2015 (video: 2 minutes).
www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p02gxlt8
(C) Clinical Anatomy of the European Hamster, Cricetus cricetus, L. Digital Library, University of North Texas (UNT), undated
digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc28308/m1/62/
("Figure 2-49: Radiogram of adult European hamster, demonstrating size and shape of cheek puches in distended state. Cheek pouches filled with 10 ml mikropaque (Nicholas)")
(D) Important Pest Identification. The Gopher Guy (pest control), undated
www.thegopherguy.com/pages/pestid.html
(photo legend: "The Pocket Gopher is named for its external fur-lined cheek pouches that he uses to carry roots, tubers and other vegetative matter")
(E) Tree squirrel (living in the tree, such as gray squirrel) and flying squirrel do not have a cheek pouch. Yet ground squirrel (living in burrows) does have.

(d) “So Weetjens started an aid group, Apopo, that trains the rats in Tanzania and then deploys them to minefields in various countries. Apopo is also now branching off into using HeroRats to detect tuberculosis”

Alan Poling, Bart Weetjens et al, Tuberculosis Detection by Giant African Pouched Rats. Behav Anal, 34: 37-54 (2011)
www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3089413/