Max Weber Blog's

Mozambique is still littered with land mines from the country's civil war that ended in 1992. According to Handicap International, an estimated 20 people step on landmines every month in Mozambique. In addition to claiming the lives of about 60 percent of those who step on them, those land mines eat up land that could be used for farming, etc.
So Mozambique is turning to trained rats to de-mine the country. The rats have an acute sense of smell and are small enough not to detonate the mines. Every time they detect explosive, they make a clicking sound and receive a bit of banana as a reward. Rats trained under the scheme have already helped clear large swathes of land in mine-infested Mozambique.

It takes nine months of painstaking on-and-off field training for a rat to be deployed for mine detection, but they much better job than dogs or humans. A team of two rats can clear a 200 sq mt minefield in two hours rather than the day it takes humans.

The brain behind the project named APOPO (a Dutch acronym meaning Anti-Personnel Land Mines Detection Product Development) is Bart Weetjens, a 33 years old Buddhist monk who trains HeroRats – the rodents that has helped sniff out not only landmines but also tuberculosis infection. In 2008 and 2009, about 30 state-accredited HeroRats, scampered across more than a million square meters of Mozambican land, ferreting out almost 400 mines and other ordnance. The U.N. says 9.6 million square meters still needed to be cleared in 2009
You can read more about HeroRats at Time.











Photos: YASUYOSHI CHIBA / AFP / Getty Images

An amazing position to be in, and come out of it alive!

I really like acrobatics and all sorts of tricks, but here's a horse never had to look at is probably very difficult, because the work with animals can turn into anything you like.

White Elephants

Rare albino Elephants. More images after the break...

Zoos around Europe put carved pumpkins in animal enclosures to see what would happen. Here is what happened.

Siberian tiger Ingrid and her four-month-old cubs, Rosa (left) and Zaria, investigate a pumpkin at Port Lympne wild animal park in Kent


Rosa pounces on the pumpkin

Chimpanzee Blossom eyes up a pumpkin in her enclosure at Blair Drummond safari park in Scotland

Foufou, a western lowland gorilla, with her two-year-old baby Louna, plays with a pumpkin at Port Lympne wild animal park

A ring-tailed lemur inspects a pumpkin at the Bioparco zoo in Rome, Italy

A northern plains grey langur plays with a carved pumpkin at Nyiregyhaza animal park in Nyiregyhaza, Hungary

A Japanese macaque plays with a pumpkin at the Bioparco zoo

Japanese macaques sit above a pumpkin at the Bioparco zoo

An orangutan nibbles a pumpkin at the Tierpark Hagenbeck in Hamburg, Germany

A red-crowned crane, also called a Japanese crane or Manchurian crane, takes a bite from a Halloween pumpkin at Nyiregyhaza animal park

An orangutan eats a pumkin in her enclosure in the Tierpark Hagenbeck

Two orangutans share a pumkin in their enclosure in the Tierpark Hagenbeck
[via The Guardian]

While homeless people around the world are struggling for a bed to lie on and a roof over their heads, the street cats and dogs in the tiny little village of Pirogovo in the southern outskirts of the Ukrainian capital city of Keiv, has been more fortunate. For located on the site of a former city dump on a hill outside the village is a shelter for homeless cats and dogs. It was built in 1960 and popularly known as "knacker's yard," or simply "booth". The shelter, run by SOS animals society of Kiev, is currently taking care of over 2,000 stray dogs and other homeless animals.