About a year and a half ago I stumbled on the Hero Rat website and was very impressed, but as one often does I put it aside for later and forgot all about it. Until last January (‘09) that is, when it popped into my mind that even I could afford the 5 Euro (just over $7) monthly fee of adopting a rat. So I did.
Kim is one of the 5 “symbolic” rats that you can adopt, actually from what I’ve gathered looking through their info there are at least 300 rats being trained or doing what they’ve been trained for. In Kim’s case this means detecting tuberculosis, which she does well! Last September in Tanzania where they work for instance these rats found 70 patients with active TB that were missed by microscopy!
And there seems to be quite a few other diseases that a well trained rat could detect, even certain cancers. But the reason I found this program in the first place was while searching the web to see what was being done to detect landmines. Because of their sense of smell and if trained to find explosives, they can detect both metal and plastic cased landmines and they are too light to set them off!
There are still a hundred million landmines buried in many places of the world. They kill or maim 45 to 50 people a day, often children, and they prevent many communities from farming the land that surrounds them. Combatants continue to lay 40,000 new mines each year and it is thought that at present rates, it will take 500 years to remove them all…
So I’ve been wanting to adopt a second rat and have just chosen Ziko.
:-)
About Hero Rats:
A few links:
Find out more about Hero Rats (updated 4/2012, new website)
Ban Landmines Now!
Stop Cluster Munitions. org