By Ragna Frans | project assistant
“Godiva is a fast learner. I’m very confident she’ll detect many mines and make sure the people of Mozambique can move around freely and grow food again”, says trainer Yaumi.
Godiva is one of APOPO’s HeroRATs, trained to detect landmines. APOPO trains the rats through operant conditioning, using a combination of click training and food rewarding. Training starts at the age of 4-5 weeks, with socialization. The young rats are weaned from their mothers and APOPO’s trainers begin socializing them to the sights, sounds, and textures of the human world. Once the rats are six weeks old, click training begins, where the rats learn to associate a click sound with a food reward – usually banana or peanuts. After two weeks at this stage, the rats learn that click means food and are now ready to be trained on a target scent. Godiva was taught to detect TNT, a type of explosives commonly used for landmines. After odor imprint, the complexity of the tasks gradually increases until the rats reach the final training stage where they have to do a blind test in order to be accredited and work at the field.
Godiva will join the team in Mozambique, where the mine detection rats have proven they can quickly and accurately detect landmines, significantly speeding up mine clearance efforts. They are used as part of an overall integrated system whereby the MDR are deployed alongside other assets and technologies like ground preparation and demining machines, manual deminers with metal detectors and survey teams all working to release and return land to local communities. So far, the APOPO team Mozambique, with the help of the HeroRATs, has found about 13255 landmines, 26934 small arms and ammunitions and 1104 bombs. Thanks to the hard work of the mine action teams, 10,928,941 m2 of land has been returned to the local communities in Mozambique.
We thank you for helping us train Godiva and we couldn’t agree more with trainer Yaumi. We’re convinced Godiva will succeed for the blind tests and will do an excellent job in Mozambique, helping free the country of landmines.
With Gratitude,
The HeroRAT team
www.apopo.org
www.facebook.com/herorat
www.twitter.com/herorats
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