Researchers train ‘hero rats’ to identify earthquake survivors

When Donna Keane moved from Scotland to Tanzania, she had more than just culture shock to deal with.

The behavioral scientist from Scotland – her mother is Canadian – was more accustomed to working with monkeys and apes, but her new job in East Africa involved a creature less famous for its intelligence: the rat.

“I wasn’t really sure how that jump would be, because we know primates are super intelligent creatures and it was great — they’re really clever — to work with them,” she said from her home in Morogoro, Tanzania.

“With the mice, I was so amazed at how smart they are, how trainable they are, and how fast they learn, it was cool.”

APOPO Senior Researcher and Animal Behaviorist Donna Keane with one of her rescue trainees. APOPO

Over the past year, I’ve worked with the NGO, APOPO, to train mice to become invaluable members of earthquake search and rescue teams.

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The project involves mice scrambling through the rubble of collapsed buildings in search of survivors.

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“The unique advantage that mice bring to the program is that they are very small,” said Kane.

“Usually with dogs, they’re walking around the perimeter of the wreck site, but with our rats we hope they can actually get through the wreckage and get close to the victims, to give us a better idea of ​​what’s going on there and exactly where the victims are.”

The mice will wear a special small backpack containing a camera, location transmitter, and two-way radio, allowing rescuers to communicate with the trapped person.

Rats are trained to activate a switch on their backpack when they find a person under the rubble, and return an exact location to the rescuers.

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A loud rat beep will return to the surface.

Rescue rat apprentice Daniel receives a reward from a “rat juice” containing avocado and banana at the APOPO research facility in Morogoro, Tanzania. APOPO

Rodent training takes up to a year and is done with the help of a special rat recipe.

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“I think their diet is probably better than mine,” Ken joked.

“Positive reinforcement is kind of like rat juice. So it’s a mixture of avocado and banana with ground rat pellets. We also have peanuts for some of that boost as well.”

The researchers at APOPO took into account that injured and traumatic earthquake survivors may not quite welcome a mouse scratching next to them.

“The only thing we were thinking about was that [the rats] You might play a message like an audio recording saying something like, “I’m a rescue rat, I’m well trained. I’m well trained,” Kane said.

“Something like, we’ll think of the perfect message to calm people down.”

A trainee rat rescues an earthquake at the APOPO research facility in Morogoro, Tanzania. APOPO

Complete modular backpacks are being developed at the University of Eindhoven in the Netherlands.

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Kane hopes to receive the first of them by July.

Seven mice have been in training since August 2021, and the team at APOPO hope that some of them will eventually be deployed to an earthquake zone in Turkey.

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Kane says the mice won’t make any rescue dogs idle, but they will complement the human and dog teams.

She named her favorite rat “Daniel” after her nephew, because the animal “does better, but the main reason is that it’s really cute and cuddly.”

Even if some of us don’t agree with Kane’s idea of ​​”sweet and cuddly,” APOPO is calling on people to “adopt a rat” to fund their research — and possibly save a life.

The NGO has previously trained rats to sniff out landmines in places like Cambodia and Mozambique, and to detect tuberculosis samples.

© 2022 Global News, a division of Corus Entertainment Inc.

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