Hacker News

> 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.

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.

Onev demining expert claims that the rats are actually no good, but the charity persists with them anyway: https://nolandmines.com/APOPO%20rats.html

I have no expertise. His arguments sound very plausible though.

Sadly demand for 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.

If you visit Siem Reap, you can visit the APOPO visitor centre, and see the rats (and a demonstration!) for yourself. Highly recommended.

- http://apopo.org/support-us/apopo-visitor-center/

I spent the last minute observing in silence, in memory of this remarkable creature. HN sheep, I command thee all, to do the same.

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).

War sucks.

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.

Real needle in a haystack stuff, wow

These are the creatures we kill with poison and carry experiments on.

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?

Rats are incredible animals, and this is a well deserved honor.

RIP Magawa