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Mourning for the «hero rat» Magawa: The animal that tracked down hundreds of landmines in Cambodia over the years and was honored with a gold medal in 2020, died at the age of eight.
Magawa found over 100 mines in her lifetime.
REUTERS
Rats have been used as mine sweepers since the early 1990s.
Tomorrow
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An estimated six million landmines are still buried worldwide.
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Trained rats are also used to search for these.
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The most successful of them, Magawa, has now died at the age of eight.
Last year she went into well-deserved retirement: The giant hamster rat Magawa had actively helped free Cambodia from landmines for years and has been loud BBC discovered over 100 landmines and other booby traps in her career. This made it the most successful service rat for the Belgian NGO Tomorrow. As the organization announced, she has now died.
Magawa was the first rat to receive the gold medal from the animal welfare organization PDSA, an award given to animals of special merit to humanity. The rat managed to search a terrain the size of a tennis court within 20 minutes – a person equipped with a metal detector needs one to four days to do this. Thanks to their excellent noses and their low weight, which is not enough to detonate a mine, the animals are ideally suited for this task.
In her life, Magawa, who was born in Tanzania, searched over 140,000 square meters of land: In Cambodia alone, a total of six million mines are suspected. Last June, Magawa was released into retirement because she had become “a little slower” because of her age.
The approximately 70 cm long and 1.2 kg heavy Magawa had played “with the usual enthusiasm” last week. But over the weekend she slowed down in her movements, slept more and showed less and less interest in food. Finally she fell asleep peacefully. “We are all affected by this loss, but we are also grateful for the incredible work that she has done,” said Apopo in a statement.
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(trx)