Meet the amazing giant rats of Tanzania, who can detect landmines and cases of tuberculosis. Now the daredevil rodents have a new mission: seeking out disaster survivors ⬇️ https://t.co/JEwjZ7UJcm

— The Times and The Sunday Times (@thetimes) February 23, 2025

For two decades, giant rats at a training centre in Tanzania have been taught to sniff out landmines and detect tuberculosis. Now they face a different challenge. The nimble rodents will enter disaster sites fitted with mini backpacks, cameras and microphones, and sniff out survivors trapped in spaces inaccessible to humans, dogs or robots.

In the small town of Morogoro 300 African giant pouched rats are housed at a base belonging to Apopo — a non-profit co-founded in Belgium in the 1990s by two university graduates, Bart Weetjens and Christophe Cox. Apopo’s rats have helped identify a total of 160,000 landmines — in countries such as Angola and Mozambique, where they were left over from conflict with Portuguese forces in the 1960s and 1970s, as well as Azerbaijan and Cambodia. They have also screened more than half a million people for TB — by performing sniff tests on sputum samples. No rats have died as a result of their work.

Once the rats have been trained in search and rescue, Apopo plans to move them to Turkey for further trials. If successful they may then be deployed in disaster response. Apopo is also fielding requests from around the world for rats to be trained to detect everything from salmonella to smuggled wildlife products such as ivory.