Evidently Rat day here at Thinking continues. Reuters reports that explosive sniffing rats are being used to search for land mines in Africa:

Scientists in Tanzania are training 250 of the African Giant Pouched rats to find buried explosives, hoping to develop a way of easing a landmine problem afflicting countries from Sudan and Somalia to Burundi and the Democratic Republic of Congo.

While the rats could help save lives and limbs in many countries, their trainers say that teaching the long-tailed rodents is a labour of love.

"It's work that needs patience and concentration. If you don't have that then you had better not even start the job," said trainer Maureen Jubitana, as Jerry was put through his paces at the centre in the city of Morogoro.

Scuttling along a track littered with egg-shaped tea strainers containing TNT or distractions like coffee, cigarettes and spices, Jerry was rewarded with peanuts or a piece of banana each time he identified the explosives correctly.

The five-month-old rodent is still some way from being considered an expert in the world of rodent mine identification.

He has reached the fourth stage of training but has to pass three more classes before he can take exams to be certified as a fully-fledged landmine detector and join a small vanguard of qualified rats already in action.

Trainers have sent 22 rats to mine-infested Mozambique after putting them through the course, run by the Belgian demining organisation APOPO and Tanzania's Sokoine University of Agriculture.

Using the same technique, the scientists are embarking on a new programme to train the rats to identify tuberculosis (TB) in saliva samples from suspected sufferers.

[read]