US Army To Train Rats To Save Soldiers' Lives 110
Hugh Pickens writes "The Department of Defense currently relies on dogs as the animal of choice for explosives detection but training dogs is expensive and takes a long time. Now the U.S. Army is sponsoring a project to develop and test a rugged, automated and low-cost system for training rats to detect improvised explosive devices and mines. 'The automated system we're developing is designed to inexpensively train rats to detect buried explosives to solve an immediate Army need for safer and lower-cost mine removal,' says senior research engineer William Gressick. Trained rats would also create new opportunities to detect anything from mines to humans buried in earthquake rubble because rats can search smaller spaces than a dog can, and are easier to transport. Rats have already been trained by the National Police in Colombia to detect seven different kinds of explosives including ammonium nitrate and fuel oil, gunpowder and TNT but the Rugged Automated Training System (Rats) research sponsored by the U.S. Army Research Laboratory, plans to produce systems for worldwide use since mines are widespread throughout much of Africa, Asia, and Central America and demining operations are expected to continue for decades to restore mined land to civilian use. 'Beyond this application, the system will facilitate the use of rats in other search tasks such as homeland security and search-and-rescue operations" adds Gressick. "In the long-term, the system is likely to benefit both official and humanitarian organizations.'"
A rodent-vs-mine matchup has apparently been in the works for some time.
I did demining for a while actually (Score:5, Informative)
As far as machines and how stuff is done now, check out minewolf [minewolf.com]. They're the de-facto producer of mine-clearing equipment. Basically, you have three sorts of methods for clearning an area. Machine, manual with detectors or dogs. As often as you can, you use a machine to do it quicly, and then use dogs/manual for verification. Dogs are not considering good enough for primary search, only verification.. and some organisations have trouble pulling that off even. Dogs are difficult, but a lot cheaper and faster than humans.
As far as using mice goes, they need to be very good. The UN does accredition for most humanitarion demining, so the mice will need to find all the mines in a training field before they're allowed to do real work. I really don't see that happening anytime soon.
As a low-cost solution for the army, or if you need something quick-n-dirty in a disaster zone I'm sure they have their uses though.. but with humanitarion demining, you kinda need to be able to tell people that they will not blow up if they start farming the land you just cleared.. which makes it a very slow process which takes a lot of effort, a whole different beast than military demining.
Also, on that note: fuck the US for dropping shitloads of cluster munitions on Laos, when you weren't even at war (Laos is the country next to Vietnam) and then having the fucking balls to not even attempt to help clean it up afterwards. FYI Canada and Europe are there now cleaning your mess.. some people consider less innocent children being blown up in pieces a good thing. Some people are, as a collective, not fucking assholes.
If you had any sort of decency you'd sign the Ottawa Treaty.
concept is from before 1997 (Score:4, Informative)
and has been used heavily since.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/APOPO [wikipedia.org]
known original work:
http://www.apopo.org/cms.php?cmsid=16&lang=en [apopo.org]