国产热热热精品,亚洲视频久久】日韩,三级婷婷在线久久,99人妻精品视频,精品九热人人肉肉在线,AV东京热一区二区,91po在线视频观看,久久激情宗合,青青草黄色手机视频

USEUROPEAFRICAASIA 中文雙語Fran?ais
China
Home / China / Top Stories

Handlers train rats to sniff out land mines

By Reuters in Siem Reap, Cambodia | China Daily | Updated: 2015-07-15 07:59

Pit, only 2 years old and with one eye, needed just 11 minutes to locate a deadly mine buried in a Cambodian field, a task that humans with metal detectors could have taken up to five days to complete.

Pit is part of a team of elite rats imported from Africa that Cambodia is training to sniff out land mines that still dot the countryside after decades of conflict.

"Under a clear sky, he would have been quicker," said Hul Sokheng, a veteran Cambodian mine clearer who oversees the training of 12 handlers. They are being taught to work with 15 Gambian pouched rats to clear Cambodia's farmland and rural villages of explosives.

"These are lifesaving rats," he said under rainy skies.

One of the biggest advantages of using rats is that land mines pose no danger to them because they are not heavy enough to trigger an explosion.

Their work could prove vital in a country where unexploded devices, including mines and shells, have killed nearly 20,000 people and wounded about 44,000 since 1979, according to the Cambodian government.

Pit, who can smell highly explosive TNT inside land mines, is watched over by two handlers who keep the one-eyed rat attached to a tether while he searches through the grass.

Pit and the other rats were sent to Cambodia from Tanzania in April by APOPO, a Belgian nonprofit organization. They have been trained to find mines since they were 4 weeks old. At the training field, Pit sniffed TNT scented objects, stopped, dug a little, and was rewarded with a banana.

"He knows his duty: search," said Hul Sokheng.

Cambodia is still littered with land mines after emerging from decades of war, including the 1970s Khmer Rouge "killing fields" genocide, leaving it with one of the world's highest disability rates.

APOPO has used the rodents for mine-clearing projects in several countries, including Angola, Mozambique, Thailand, Laos and Vietnam.

Handlers train rats to sniff out land mines

A rat undergoes training to find mines at a center in Cambodia on Thursday. Mines have killed nearly 20,000 people in the country since 1979. Samrang Pring / Reuters

Editor's picks
Copyright 1995 - . All rights reserved. The content (including but not limited to text, photo, multimedia information, etc) published in this site belongs to China Daily Information Co (CDIC). Without written authorization from CDIC, such content shall not be republished or used in any form. Note: Browsers with 1024*768 or higher resolution are suggested for this site.
License for publishing multimedia online 0108263

Registration Number: 130349
FOLLOW US
柳江县| 东乡县| 龙川县| 玉溪市| 岚皋县| 岑巩县| 韩城市| 宣汉县| 宜黄县| 仪征市| 特克斯县| 阿瓦提县| 察哈| 桂林市| 定南县| 张家川| 牟定县| 西平县| 乌海市| 盐亭县| 昆山市| 宕昌县| 淅川县| 屏东县| 灵山县| 新巴尔虎左旗| 信阳市| 东港市| 慈利县| 搜索| 五指山市| 额济纳旗| 贞丰县| 天镇县| 南丰县| 乐至县| 英吉沙县| 连云港市| 广东省| 灵台县| 赞皇县|