Heroic rat honored with gold medal for hunting landmines in Cambodia

A British animal charity awarded its highest Gold Medal for valor to a squeaking, bewhiskered rodent in honor of the tiny creature's work detecting landmines in Cambodia. The brown-furred Magawa, nearly six years old, is credited with sniffing out 39 landmines and 28 items of unexploded ordnance, and is the first rat to be recognized for heroism by the People's Dispensary for Sick Animals (PDSA).

"Magawa's life-changing work has had a direct impact on the lives of many men, women and children in Cambodia affected by landmines," said PDSA director-general Jan McLoughlin at a virtual ceremony on Friday. "Every discovery he makes reduces the risk of injury or death for local people."

Magawa is so small that his medal had to be custom cast, to attach to the little harness he wears while hunting for mines.

The work is especially important in Cambodia, PDSA noted, because the landscape there is littered with about 3 million landmines from past wars. Hidden mines have caused more than 60,000 casualties, the group reports.

Magawa's work consists of patrolling mine-infested fields for some 30 minutes a day, and scratching the ground when he smells explosives. Because he is so light — weighing less than three pounds — Magawa does not trigger the device to blow up. But his scratching alerts his handler, and prompts others to carefully unearth and disarm the mine.

Over the course of his career, Magawa has helped clear more than 35 acres of land, PDSA said.

"Magawa has been detecting landmines for the past five years," the group wrote in a statement. "He completely ignores any scrap metal lying around and so is much faster at finding landmines than people would be. He can search the area of a tennis court in 30 minutes, something that would take a human with a metal detector up to four days."

Magawa, whose official job title is HeroRAT, is an African giant pouched rat who was born in 2014 at an anti-landmine training center in Tanzania. The center, APOPO (an acronym for the Dutch translation of "Anti-Personnel Landmines Detection Product Development") trains rats to detect tuberculosis and landmines.

Like others in his rat pack, Magawa was trained to associate the smell of explosives with receiving a prize.

"We use clicker training to teach rats like Magawa to scratch at the ground above a landmine," APOPO's CEO, Christophe Cox, said in a statement. "During training they hear a 'click' and receive a tasty food reward for finding the correct target scent."

When Magawa completed his training in Tanzania, he went to work in Cambodia. There, he became APOPO's most successful HeroRAT — and staked his place among valiant animals. 

The PDSA has awarded its Gold Medal for outstanding bravery to 29 other civilian animals — all of them dogs who showed courage while working with police, or who saved their human families from perils such as house fires or intruders.

The medal is inscribed with these words: "For animal gallantry or devotion to duty."