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Rats and a cat bodyguard recruited to tackle Colombia's land mines

Colombian police are training up a new elite squad of rats and a cat to tackle the growing problems of land mines laid by Marxist rebels.

Tomas the cat is being trained alongside 14 rats, including his partner Pablo, in a laboratory in the north of the capital, Bogota.

Vet Luisa Fernanda Mendez, who runs the laboratory, said: "We chose rats because they have a sniffing capacity similar to dogs, but can search in less accessible sites and their training can be completed more quickly."

The role of the cats is to act as "bodyguards" to protect the rats from predators such as other cats or iguanas.

The training program for the rats lasts two to three months and start when the rat is just a month old. Other nations, among them Spain and Mexico, are looking at the Colombian experiment, attracted by the low costs - the project has a budget of less than £30,000 a year - and the possibilities in the fight against terrorism.

Once the rats find a mine they stand up on their hind legs alongside it, until an explosive experts comes up to either decommission it or destroy in with a controlled explosion.

The rats are now being delivered to specialised police units, the carabineros, that act in rural and high-risk areas. There, they will be given time to get used to their handlers before being deployed to zones where land mines are common.

For policeman Henry Munoz, used to training dogs and horses, working with rats took a little getting used to.

"To begin with there was a little repulsion," he admitted. "But now I am used to it."

Every day land mines and improvised explosive devices (IEDs) kill or main three people in Colombia and the country has overtaken Afghanistan and Cambodia as the country with the most land mine victims.

The vast majority of the land mines are laid by the Marxist rebel group the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, which has been battling for 44 years to overthrow the government and impose a socialist regime.

They have perfected the fabrication of artisanal mines, known unaffectionately in Colombia as "footbreakers".

Made from common plastic tubing used in guttering their devices contain little metal and so are harder to detect by conventional means.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/main.jhtml?xml=/earth/2008/09/12/eara...

By august on Sep 12, 2008, 12:32 in Politics & the war.

dwmte7 says on Sep 14, 2008, 04:53:

i read an article about the use of rats to sniff (?) out explosives (mines) some time back. i don't remember what country it was in.

dwmte

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