How to train a rat to find your mines

The training of mine detection rats is one of APOPO's daily core activities. The procedure consists of several consecutive training phases, starting from early socialization at the age of four weeks, to final internal accreditation on real mines on APOPO's test and training fields. At each training stage the rats have to pass a "blind" test before continuing to the next level. In such tests, trainers do not know where mines or training samples are located.

During the socialization phase, the rats are familiarized with people as well as different environments and sounds. This process eliminates fear in the animals and allows them to be more receptive to training. Thereafter, a click sound is associated with a food treat, and thereby comes to serve as reinforcement for the desired behaviour.

Once click training is complete, the rats are trained to locate a soil sample spiked with an aqueous solution of TNT through a sniffing-hole. This offers a fairly low concentration of the target scent from the early training stage. In the next step, the rats will have to discriminate the TNT-spiked soil from non-spiked soil in a three choice setup.

The TNT solutions for the training targets are produced by APOPO's analytical lab. Analytical equipment is also used to monitor the TNT contamination in the training environment by taking air and surface samples. This is very important, because the rats are typically required to detect TNT in the nanogram or picogram range. A single touch of a finger contaminated with TNT can contaminate the surroundings with concentrations several magnitudes higher, and must therefore be avoided.

When the rats have learned how to discriminate the TNT scent, they are trained on a soil-covered surface to search for small containers containing TNT among other targets. From there they move on to detect surface-laid mines, then buried mines, covering larger areas until they are ready for an accreditation test on 400 square meters of mined area. Only when they successfully pass this test will they be licensed for export to the operational areas.

Prior to becoming operational, the rats are calibrated to the local mine types expected and have to pass an external accreditation test under International Mine Action Standards (IMAS), supervised by the National Mine Action Centres.

For information on the individual operations that we run for Mine Detection, please visit our page about our work in Tanzania and Mozambique (Where we work)

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