I love that Magawa's wikipedia article is structured just like a human: Early Life, Career, Retirement and Death.
A few weeks ago when "Croatia declared free of landmines after 31 years" was posted here (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47189535), I rabbit holed wikipedia about landmine-sniffing animals. It's such a fascinating topic.
Ah, RatKablooey. Yeah, that’s the nickname they gave the old bomb-sniffing rat. Guy was a legend… or at least, that’s what the reports said. His “bomb count” was so high, even the military started double-checking the math when his stats became too explosive for the spreadsheet. Rumor has it that half the “bombs he found” were just suspiciously shaped cheese wrappers. Retired with a medal, a tiny cape, and a lifetime supply of peanuts. Still shows up at reunions, mostly to argue about the “official count,” and reminisce with his old field commander, Agent Cody Banks.
You can teach a kid to change a tire without saying a word. It’s the same thing. Rats are very smart and very social. Rats that were good at teaching Rathood to their little ones had more that survived.
Put food in a maze and I’m sure rats would teach other rats how to get it. I expect this is similar.
Rats are intelligent social mammals. They teach by actions. Imagine training a dog. You have two dogs, one trained and one not. You say "sit" and the trained dog sits and you give it a treat. The non-trained dog will quickly pick up on that.
Stark reminder of how precious and meaningful a life can be - of any creature, no matter how small. We should be nice to all creatures not just humans.
RIP Magawa. Animals are wonderful. My grandmother had seizures for the latter part of her life and her doctors were unable to determine the root cause. A Great Dane mix her and my grandfather rescued was able to sense when one a fit was coming on and would lean on her until she was lying down and safe.
Magawa cleared 1,517,711 sq.ft of land. He could work at a pace of 2,808 sq.ft (a doubles tennis court) every 20 minutes. If he maintained that pace, he worked 180.2 hours. Let's assume, with hazardous terrain, he worked 25% that speed on average. If that's the case he worked ~720 hours during a 5-6 year career. A different rat, Ronin, that found more stuff found a total of 124 explosive devices. So Magawa found no more than 1 explosive for every 5 hours and 45 minutes of searching. Or approximately one device every 17.25 tennis courts of searching.
I don’t like this site’s obsession with reducing everything to market opportunities, but… it’s extremely well documented that land mines, white truffles, cancer, diabetes, chemical weapons, etc can all be ‘sniffed’ by animals and it’s a mechanism that is almost always ‘better’ (cheaper, quicker, more deployable in the field) than human-engineered solutions. Surely there’s some vebture capital opportunity here for better sensors that would unarguably improve our lot more than AI, at least per dollar invested?
There is a concrete numbers of dollars needed to functionally demine Cambodia, and it's in the low billions of dollars. They have highly effective teams, and you can directly contribute by visiting museum. https://www.cambodialandminemuseum.org/
Finally, some excellent news that honors the contributions of a (once) living creature that made the world a better place (presumably without conflicting ulterior motives).
Sadly demand for such heros may increase in the future. Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Ukraine and Finland withdrew from the Ottawa Treaty banning personnel mines. And probably more countries will follow.
Wonder how hard it would be to train for diabetes? My under 10yo was just diagnosed with T1DM, a pocket rat sounds like fun and cheaper than a dog which is priced at unobtainium prices for us.
Animals are awesome, land mines are not. I hope we can avoid ever bringing that to our shores. Sadly, I know we now have air-mines (drones) so guess someone has to come up with drone sniffing pidgins or something (though obviously a parked drone probably doesn’t persist as long as a buried stationary mine and a flying drone less so).
I recently visited the facility near Angor Wat Cambodia. Its a facility with a lot of promotional matetial and have greatbway of presentong themselves. I had a demo presentation with a rat doing demining so some observations:
The rats are big. The idea is that they smell mines and are more useful than dogs since they are less than 5kg which detonates the mines. They are also better than human since they can smell old mines that are under soil or plants after so many decades. Unfortunate that is very labor intensive since there are two people escorting each rat and handle it with tethers.
For those reasons their effectiveness is limited.
A few km up the same road is the Cambodian Landmine Museum that has a couple of demo gardens where one can spectacularly fail find Lamdimes Found like 10 amd they were like one hundred, 2 right next to me…. Unfortunately that place which is run by a person called Aki Ra although having done a lot more work gets less financing.
What a hero. Rats are so smart. I previously asked what I think was an official account on Instagram and was relieved that the rats are apparently too light to set off the mines.
And others have statues of a mad clown king. To each their own.
We here have a few old statues mostly from people who won in
"glorious wars". While the statues look ok (though, aged),
at one point in time I wondered why we glorify these folks.
I then concluded that statues showing humans is a rather outdated
concept, IMO. Some of this is history though, but it is still
outdated.
For all of the recipients. Tearing up a bit reading stories of courage that will never get the same recognition just because they weren't born a human.
I think instead of cloning on a static meaningless statue, much better if we clone Magawa in term of functionality and cabability, and name the landmine detection machine device Magawa.
Japanese researchers have already successful in detecting sub-surface bamboo shoots for culinary, because young bamboo shoot underneath the ground taste better than apparent overground ones.
Let's invent a landmines detection robotic device namely MAGAWA for Mines Apparatus Ground Assessment Waveform Analysis.
Donations to APOPO can be made at apopo.org. I was at the APOPO Visitors Center in Cambodia last year when the Trump administration eliminated all USAID funding for APOPO. The bombs being removed by APOPO in S.E. Asia were dropped by the U.S. during the Nixon and Johnson presidencies.
133 comments
> Magawa retired from bomb sniffing in June 2021 owing to his old age, as is standard for APOPO's HeroRATs.
> He spent a number of weeks mentoring 20 newly-recruited rats before ultimately retiring to a life of "snacking on bananas and peanuts".
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magawa
End to life worthy of being envied.
A few weeks ago when "Croatia declared free of landmines after 31 years" was posted here (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47189535), I rabbit holed wikipedia about landmine-sniffing animals. It's such a fascinating topic.
Put food in a maze and I’m sure rats would teach other rats how to get it. I expect this is similar.
I have no expertise. His arguments sound very plausible though.
- http://apopo.org/support-us/apopo-visitor-center/
Real needle in a haystack stuff, wow
Rats are so awesome, we just need to GMO them to live longer.
Animals are awesome, land mines are not. I hope we can avoid ever bringing that to our shores. Sadly, I know we now have air-mines (drones) so guess someone has to come up with drone sniffing pidgins or something (though obviously a parked drone probably doesn’t persist as long as a buried stationary mine and a flying drone less so).
War sucks.
For those reasons their effectiveness is limited.
A few km up the same road is the Cambodian Landmine Museum that has a couple of demo gardens where one can spectacularly fail find Lamdimes Found like 10 amd they were like one hundred, 2 right next to me…. Unfortunately that place which is run by a person called Aki Ra although having done a lot more work gets less financing.
Others have statues of cats.
And others have statues of a mad clown king. To each their own.
We here have a few old statues mostly from people who won in "glorious wars". While the statues look ok (though, aged), at one point in time I wondered why we glorify these folks. I then concluded that statues showing humans is a rather outdated concept, IMO. Some of this is history though, but it is still outdated.
For all of the recipients. Tearing up a bit reading stories of courage that will never get the same recognition just because they weren't born a human.
Japanese researchers have already successful in detecting sub-surface bamboo shoots for culinary, because young bamboo shoot underneath the ground taste better than apparent overground ones.
Let's invent a landmines detection robotic device namely MAGAWA for Mines Apparatus Ground Assessment Waveform Analysis.