Bart Weetjens: Teaching rats to sniff out landmines
Bart Weetjens talks about his extraordinary project: training rats to sniff out land mines. He shows clips of his ‘hero rats’ in action, and previews his work’s next phase: teaching them to turn up tuberculosis in the lab.
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ABOUT Bart Weetjens
“Bart Weetjens works with locals in Morogoro, Tanzania to run a world-class facility that trains rats to do something astonishing: sniff out land mines. (The African giant pouched rat, the species used in the project, is widespread in the region.) The rats that pass the training and the same rigorous testing applied to land mine-sniffing canines become what Weetjens calls ‘HeroRats’. Bart is now applying a similar approach to other fields, training rats to diagnose tuberculosis in hospitals.”
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