OH RATS

 I read this a few days ago.  Stick with it.  It's sobering.

There is a type of rat called the African pouched rat.  They call it pouched because it has fat cheeks in which it can hold it's food something like a chipmunk.  That's not the amazing thing about pouched rats - it's that they are smart.  Very smart.  

Just like we have learned to train dogs to detect drugs and explosives, a bunch of these rats were trained to detect TNT.  And why did anyone train them?  They are light weight.  They are used to find buried land mines - many of them are being employed in Cambodia.  They are too light to triger the land mines but can smell the explosives in them and will stop and dig for it when they smell it.  They get a treat.  

The real amazing thing about this story is that they are estimating 3 million land mines remain in that country from the Vietnam war.  The Viet Cong used to sneak through Cambodia to get from the North into South Vietnam.  That is an amazing number.  The rats can find them a lot faster and safer than we can by any other means.  The kicker is that Cambodia says they have had some 20,000 people killed and about 40,000 injured from land mines left there since 1979.  

This is a tragedy.