How I taught rats to sniff out land mines Bart Weetjens

I’m here today to share with you an

extraordinary journey extraordinarily

rewarding journey actually which brought

me into training rats to save human

lives by detecting landmines and

tuberculosis as a child I had two

passions one was a passion for rodents I

had all kinds of rats mice hamsters

gerbils squirrels you name it I bred it

and I sold them to pet shops I also had

a passion for Africa growing up in a

multicultural environment we had African

students in the house and I learned

about their stories so different

backgrounds dependency on imported

know-how goods services exuberant

cultural diversity Africa was truly

fascinating for me I became an

industrial engineer engineering product

development and I focused on appropriate

detection technologies actually the

first appropriate technologies for

developing countries I started working

in the industry but I wasn’t really

happy to contribute to a material

consumer society in a linear extracting

and manufacturing mode I quit my job to

focus on a real-world problem

land mines we’re talking 95 now Princess

Diana is announcing on TV that land

mines form a structural barrier to any

development which is really true as long

as these devices are there or there is

suspicion of land mines you can’t really

enter into the land actually there was

an appeal worldwide for new detectors

sustainable in the environment where

they needed to produce which is mainly

in the developing world

we chose rats why would you choose rats

because aren’t they burning well

actually rats are in contrary to what

most people think about them rats are

highly sociable creatures and actually

what you see here there’s a target

somewhere here you see an operator a

trained African with its rats in front

who actually left and right there the

animal finds mine it scratches on the

soil and the animal comes back for a

food reward very very simple very

sustainable in this environment here the

animal gets its food reward and that’s

how it works very very simple now why

would you use rats rats have been used

since the 50s last century in all kinds

of experiments rats have more genetic

material allocated to affection than any

other mammal species they’re extremely

sensitive to smell moreover they have

the mechanisms to map all these smells

and to communicate about it now how do

we communicate with rats well we we

don’t talk rats but we have a clicker

standard method for animal training

which you see there a clicker which

makes a particular sound with which you

can reinforce particular behaviors first

of all we associate a click sound with

the food reward which is mashed banana

and peanuts together in a syringe once

the animal knows click food

click food click food so click his food

we bring it in a cage with the hole and

actually the animal learns to stick the

nose in the hole under which the target

sent this place and to do that for 5

seconds 5 seconds which is long for a

rat once the animal knows this we make

the task a bit more difficult it learns

now to find the target smell in a cage

with several holes up to 10 holes then

the animal learns to walk on a leash in

the open and find targets in the next

step animals learn to find real minds in

real minefields they are tested and

accredited according international mine

action standards just like dogs have to

pass a test this consists of four

hundred square meters there’s a number

of minds a number of minds placed

blindly

and team of trainer and their rat have

to find back all the all the targets if

the animal does that it gets a license

as an accredited animal to be

operational in the field just like dogs

by the way maybe one slight difference

we can train rats at the fifth of the

price of a trained demining dog this is

our team in Mozambique one Tanzanian

trainer who transfers the skills to

these three Mozambican fellows and you

should see the pride in the eyes of

these people they have a skill which

makes them much less dependent on

foreign aid moreover this small team

together with of course you need the

heavy vehicles and the manual D miners

to follow up but with this small

investment in an rat capacity we have

demonstrated in Mozambique that we can

reduce the cost price per square meter

up to 60% of what is currently normal $2

per square meter we do it at 1.18 and we

can still bring that price down question

of scale if we can bring in more rats we

can actually make the output even bigger

we have a demonstration site in

Mozambique 11 African governments have

seen that they can become less dependent

by using this technology they have

signed a pact for peace and treaty in

the Great Lakes region and they endorse

hero rats to clear their common borders

of land mines but let me bring it to a

very different problem and this about

6000 people last year that walked on a

landmine but worldwide last year almost

1.9 million died from tuberculosis as a

first cause of infection especially in

Africa where TB and HIV are strongly

linked there is a huge common problem

microscopy the standard whu-oh procedure

reaches from 40 to 60 percent

reliability in Tanzania the numbers

don’t lie

forty five percent of people get that TB

patients gets diagnosed with

tbh before they die that means that if

you have TB you have more chance that

you won’t be detected but will just die

from TB secondary infections and so on

and if however you are detected very

early diagnosed early treatment can

start and even in HIV positives it makes

sense you can actually cure TB even in

HIV positives so in our common language

Dutch the name for T V is staring which

etymologically refers to the smell of

tar already the old Chinese and the

Greek Hippocrates have actually

published documented that TB can be

diagnosed based on the volatiles exuding

from patients so what we did is we

collected some samples as a way of

testing from hospitals trained rats on

them and well see see if this work and

maunder well we can reach eighty nine

percent sensitivity eighty six percent

specificity using multiple rats in a row

this is how it works and really this is

a generic technology report now

explosive tuberculosis but then you

imagine you can actually put anything

under there so how does it work you have

a cassette with ten samples with these

ten samples at once in the case

an animal only needs two hundredths of a

second to discriminate the sense which

those extremely fast here it’s already

at the third sample this is a positive

sample gets a click sounds and and by

doing so very fast we can have like a

second line opinions where to see which

patients are positive which are negative

just as an indication whereas a

microscope is can process 40 samples in

a day a rat can process the same amount

of samples in seven minutes only a cage

like this

a cage like this provided that you have

rats and we have now currently 25 to be

closest rats a cage like this operating

throughout the day can process thousand

six hundred eighty samples can you

imagine the potential offspring

applications environmental detection of

pollutants in soils the customs

application the detection of illicit

goods in containers and so on but let’s

seek first to to be close I just want to

briefly highlight the blue rods are the

scores of microscopy only in the five

clinics in darussalam on a population of

500,000 people where 15,000 reported to

get a tested on microscopy found

thousand eight hundred patients and by

just presenting those samples once more

to the rats and looping those results

back we were able to increase case

detection rates by over 30 percent

throughout last year we’ve been

depending on which intervals we take

we’ve been consistently increasing case

detection rates in five hospitals in

dar-es-salaam between 30 and 40 percent

so this really considerable knowing that

the mist patient by microscopy infects

up to 15 people healthy people per year

you can be sure that we have saved lots

of lives at least our hero rats have

saved lots of lives the way forward for

us is now to standardize this technology

and there are simple things like for

instance we have small laser in the

sniffer Hall where the animal has to

stick for five seconds so to standardize

this also to standardize the pellets the

food rewards and to semi-automatics in

order to replicate this on a much larger

scale and affect lives of many more

people to conclude there are also other

applications at the horizonte' R is the

first prototype of our camera rat which

is a rat with a rat backpack with the

camera it can go under rubble to detect

for victims after earthquake and so on

this in a prototype stage we don’t have

a working system here

to conclude I would actually like to

save you may think this is about rats

this project but in the end it is about

people it is about empowering vulnerable

communities to tackle difficult

expensive and dangerous humanitarian

detection tasks and doing that with a

local resource plenty available so

something completely different is to

keep on challenging your perception

about the resources surrounding you

whether they are environmental

technological animal or human and to

respectfully harmonize with them in

order to foster a sustainable world

thank you very much