Mozambique is still littered with land mines from the country's civil war that ended in 1992. According to Handicap International, an estimated 20 people step on landmines every month in Mozambique. This in a country where 70 percent of the population lives below the poverty line and good healthcare is scarce, and the life expectancy is only about 41 years (more than 12 percent of the population is estimated to be infected with HIV). And in addition to claiming the lives of about 60 percent of those who step on them, those land mines eat up land that could be used for farming, etc.So how to de-mine the country? Rats. To some people they're pets, to others they're pests, but they're also saviors with a nose for sniffing out trouble -- finding scores of land mines with no casualties to the rats (they're too light to trip the mines) or their trainers. Read the story and flip through the pictures of the HeroRats at CNN, which reports that "in 2008 and 2009, about 30 state-accredited HeroRats, their noses atwitter, scampered across more than a million square meters of Mozambican land, ferreting out almost 400 mines and other ordnance. The U.N. says 9.6 million square meters still needed to be cleared in 2009."
You can also help sponsor a HeroRat in its life-saving work, which includes not just finding land mines but sniffing out tuberculosis and toxins. Click here for more info.
(Handout Photo by The HALO Trust/Getty Images)
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