It's dangerous work but they never complain. And they get the job done much faster than humans can. One of them can search 200 square metres in 20 minutes, a task which would take humans with metal detectors up to four days. No one knows how many lives they've saved but we can be sure many would have been lost without them.
Nimble and highly intelligent, they've been clearing minefields for years. In Siem Reap in Cambodia, there's a stone statue honouring one of them, who cleared 22 hectares of deadly ordnance during his five-year career from 2016 to 2021.
His name was Magawa, the most famous of the African giant pouched rats deployed to clear mines left by conflicts which ended decades ago. Magawa was trained to sniff out TNT. His light weight meant he could scamper over the ground without detonating the mines buried below. Magawa was much faster than humans because he wasn't distracted by metal and only interested in the chemical signature of explosives.
