25/09/2020
Magawa (an African giant pouched rat) has been awarded a prestigious gold medal for his work detecting land mines. Magawa has sniffed out 39 landmines and 28 unexploded munitions in his career.
The UK veterinary charity PDSA has presented him with its Gold Medal for "life-saving devotion to duty, in the location and clearance of deadly landmines in Cambodia”.
The seven-year-old rodent was trained by the Belgium-registered charity Apopo (), which is based in Tanzania and has been raising the animals - known as HeroRATs - to detect landmines and tuberculosis since the 1990s. The animals are certified after a year of training. In 2014 I visited the Herorats of Apopo in Tanzania.
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