Magawa, the landmine-detecting rat, wins gold medal for saving lives in Cambodia

Though not a martial arts master rat, Magawa, in no less heroic in his antics. The African Giant Pouched Rat has won a gold medal for saving lives of men, women and children in Cambodia by detecting active landmines.

Trained by a Belgian NGO in Tanzania APOPO, Magawa is the first rat of the 30 recipients to win UK's People’s Dispensary for Sick Animals (PDSA) Gold Medal for "life-saving devotion to duty, in the location and clearance of deadly landmines in Cambodia."

Till date he has sniffed out 39 landmines and 28 unexploded munitions. Though larger than other rats, Magawa is light enough not to trigger the landmines he seeks out. At seven, he is nearing his retirement age and works half an hour a day.

More than 5 million land mines are thought to have been laid in Cambodia during the ousting of the Khmer Rouge and internal conflicts in the 1980s and 1990s. Parts of the country are also littered with unexploded ordnance dropped in US airstrikes during the Vietnam War. According to a Cambodian NGO, HALO Trust, landmines laid during the ousting of Khmer Rouge, killed over 64,000 people and left 25,000 people with amputed limbs.

APOPO has trained rats like Magawa under an initiative called HeroRATS to detect landmines through their execellent scent of smell. They are trained to completely ignore scrap metals and sniff out landmines by the chemicals used in it.

Once Magawa detects a landmine, he signals his handler to safely deactivate the landmine and is in turn rewrded with treats. He is trained to detect TNT, the chemical compound within explosives.

He can scan a field the size of a tennis court in just 20 minutes which usually takes 1 to 4 days for a human to search with a metal detector. During the five years he has worked Magawa has helped clear over 141,000 square metres of land (the equivalent of twenty football pitches).

When he is not in the minefield, the 2-foot-long rat likes snacking on bananas, peanuts and watermelons.

(With inputs from agencies)