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