00:01Nasty, sewage-dwelling, feral, invasive, disease-infested.
00:07Everyone loves to hate rats.
00:10Especially the NYC rats, all two million of them,
00:13which have been found to carry E. coli, salmonella, you name it.
00:18But don't hate this rat.
00:20This rat could save your life.
00:27This practically blind, two-foot, three-pound African giant pouched rat
00:32has a unique superpower, a sensitive nose
00:35that can detect unexploded landmines and tuberculosis.
00:39And in September, one rat named Magawa made headlines
00:42for becoming the first rat and non-canine
00:45to receive the PDSA Gold Bravery Medal.
00:48That's the animal world's version of the U.S. Medal of Valor.
00:52We are just so honored to receive it.
00:56And I think it's really important because it also raises awareness
01:00about rats and the amazing things they can do,
01:04but also the landmine problem.
01:07Magawa has detected over 39 landmines
01:10and 28 unexploded ordnance in Cambodia,
01:13where around 5 million landmines were planted between 1975 and 1998,
01:19causing over 64,000 deaths.
01:22Landmines are really like silent killers.
01:25Over 50 other countries are also contaminated with landmines,
01:29threatening over 60 million people.
01:32Mine detection rats have really done a lot
01:34to try and improve these numbers and these conditions.
01:38The rats have helped find over 108,000 explosive devices
01:42that were otherwise a big risk to these people.
01:47Magawa's brothers and sisters have also been trained
01:49by a non-profit called Apopo to sniff out mines in countries around the world.
01:54Besides their nose, what makes these hero rats
01:57more fit for the job than other mammals or humans?
02:02They're intelligent and easy to train.
02:04They're cheap and easy to breed.
02:07They're too light to set off landmines.
02:09They live for a long time.
02:11Other types of rats and rodent species
02:14maybe only live to be two or three years old.
02:17They're also much faster than humans.
02:19A hero rat can search the area the size of a tennis court in 30 minutes,
02:24while a human deminer will take four days.
02:27Here's how rats at Apopo train to become pro-sniffers.
02:31We have different stages in training.
02:34We have socialization and habituation,
02:36where we train the rat to make use of different orders.
02:41Thereafter, we introduce clicker training.
02:44Wherever you hear the sound of clickers,
02:47means that the food is coming.
02:49Thereafter, we have indication where we train the rat's smell of TNT.
02:54This TNT is chemical compound found in the mine.
02:57After that, we have another stage.
03:00We call it the discrimination stage.
03:02We mix TNT with other orders.
03:05The aim of this is just to make the rat
03:07to go for TNT and not something else.
03:10In every stage, there is a test.
03:13It means that they have to do examination
03:15and they should score 100% before shifting to another stage.
03:20After a series of blind tests,
03:22the rats are ready to go into the field.
03:25While some rats fail and enter early retirement,
03:28the majority that pass go on to bomb-sniff around the world,
03:31including Mozambique, where they already destroyed 13,000 landmines
03:35and declared the country mine-free.
03:37This rat is always detecting 100%, so you can say that this rat is good.
03:44And rats will do a lot of other good things, all for banana.
03:49Turns out, they're quicker and more accurate at detecting tuberculosis,
03:53the world's deadliest infectious disease that kills nearly 1.5 million people every year.
03:58Our rats and team at Apopo have been able to increase case detection by more than 40%.
04:05That translates into more than 18,000 people that had originally not been diagnosed at the health clinics.
04:12Standard detection in developing countries can be slow and inaccurate.
04:16So after the clinics have analyzed these samples, we present them to the rats,
04:22and we line them up like 10 in a row, and the rat sequentially sniffs each one of those samples.
04:28If the rat smells something that looks like TB to him,
04:31he will stay at that sample to let the handler know,
04:35hey, you better check this sample a little closer.
04:38Right now, the rats are in training for other heroic jobs,
04:41including detecting illegal wildlife trafficking, specifically of pangolins.
04:46The rats can help detect the presence of these things in shipping containers.
04:51There's a good chance that it could also help reduce poaching.
04:55And embarking on search and rescue missions following natural disasters.
04:59The big challenge here is locating where are they under all of these tons of rubble.
05:05The rats' real advantage that we think might be a benefit is their size.
05:09So they can get down in that rubble and really navigate those tight areas.
05:15It really seems to me like anything that has a unique odor profile,
05:19the rats will be able to detect like cancers.
05:22We know early stages of cancers may go undetected in screening methods.
05:28But maybe there are some changes in metabolic processes or in the tumor growth itself
05:35that emits an odor that the rat can detect.
05:39So there's a lot of reason to love the rat.
05:42People in Tanzania were thinking that the rat is animal that we should keep it away from the people.
05:50Most people would say and get kind of shy away from that.
05:54But I would say, oh, look.
05:56But now they don't even hate the rat because now they know that they are saving human life.
06:01So maybe it's time you rethink that pizza rat in the NYC subway.
06:05It might just be a hero.
06:06So
06:06I'll see you next time.
06:07Bye.
06:07Bye.
06:08Bye.
06:09Bye.
06:10Bye.
06:14Bye.
06:15Bye.
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