How to Train a Rat to Sniff Out Landmines

The Telegraph has an astonishing slideshow about a Dutch group that trains rats to sniff out landmines in Tanzania. With the aid of their rats, deminers can clear a field in two hours that would have taken a day without them. You will not be able to resist clicking through the close-up photographs of these little creatures being trained. Look at that harness!

A baby rat in a tiny harness twitches its pointed nose incessantly, probing a field where it is being trained by a pioneering Dutch Non Governmental Organisation in Tanzania to sniff out deadly landmines. Other rats trained under the same scheme have already helped clear large swathes of land in neighbouring mine-infested Mozambique

Read the full story at Telegraph (UK).

Image: Yasuyoshi Chiba/AFP/Getty Images.