Hero Rats

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Summary

They're called Hero Rats. Can rats help clear Africa's landmines? Landmines - brutal and indiscriminate weapons - are depressingly common in the developing world. Can the highly developed sense of ...

They're called Hero Rats. Can rats help clear Africa's landmines? Landmines - brutal and indiscriminate weapons - are depressingly common in the developing world. Can the highly developed sense of smell of rats help to clear this scourge? In this episode of Helping Social Entrepreneurs, Alvin Hall is advising Apopo, the social enterprise behind this remarkable idea, how to secure their financial future. We travel to Mozambique where we visit the largest remaining mine field in the country. There, Apopo are drawing on the rats' remarkable sense of smell and are training them to sniff out the TNT in mines. We already had filmed them being trained in Tanzania and now it was time to see them at work in Mozambique. One of the biggest hindrances to development in rural Mozambique is tghe presence, or even just the suspected presence, of a mine. This was the legacy of Mozambique's brutal civil war, which lasted more than 15 years, led to hundreds of thousands of deaths and left an estimated three million unexploded mines.

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