A harnessed rat training on a specially designed field located on the outskirts of Malanje, Angola. The base was opened in February 2014. The de-mining rats were bred and trained in Tanzania before being transported to Angola. Each rat must pass mock field tests every week before it will be used at the landmine field in Camatenda. The idea to use rats occurred in an unlikely mind in a pub in Scotland. Bart Weetjens, a former product designer from Belgium and a Zen Buddhist monk, heard about the ability of the gerbil to sniff out explosives while at a conference. Weetjens had a readymade interest in rats having had them as pet rodents as a child. Weetjens is no stranger to Africa either. As a student, he spent three months in the Congo building a soy bean mill for rural farmers. He knew Africa needed to get rid of its deadly landmines and wanted to find a way of it being cheaper and efficient. “Rodents are of course everywhere. In a moment I saw [landmine clearing rats] happening. However, between the first pitch and the first grant was two and a half years,” says Weetjens. With a million Belgian francs ($33,700), Weetjens set out to find the perfect rat for the job. The Cricetomys Gambianus, the African giant pouched rat, was it. “At that time, there were so many scientific questions that had to be asked first… I knew I wanted to use rats. But the rodent is the most diversified species in all the mammals so I went to a specialist, Professor Ron Verhagen, who worked in Africa for a long time studying all kinds of rodents. He saw a villager with a giant African pouched rat on a leash. So we said, at the very least, it must be possible to domesticate this species.”
