Apropos, how about Apopo?

I know you hate 'those' pigs, but I am sure you hate 'those' rats even more. Well, you may consider my special heroes, the HeroRats. They need a little gift for the holidays.
Aren't they cute?

I introduced you to my beloved blackish wrinkly pigs some days ago. Now it's time to look at my snoopy rats. They are my true heroes.

[video:https://youtu.be/XWftooMno0U]
[video:https://youtu.be/9IRv3TOjE1I]
[video:https://youtu.be/SL2P3ruMD9E]
I am always for transparency, so here you have it:
Money money makes the rats go round
Thank You, your peanuts are always welcome, sez the rat.
Smile

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mhagle's picture

Really amazing! Thanks for sharing this mimi. Smile

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Marilyn

"Make dirt, not war." eyo

I've heard of these rats but never watched the videos. And, while I prefer the idea of helping people (Tuberculosis, land mines etc), I also wonder how they would do at other jobs. e.g. in place of pigs in looking for forest truffles. They would certainly be easier to wrangle and here in Oregon there are a lot of mushroom and truffle hunters.

I would also curious how these guys would be as pets. My spouse has a hard time getting out of the door somedays because of misplaced keys, cellphone etc. We had a wonderful female black labrador mix for 14 years who had a very good nose. We actually trained her to find my spouse's keys. It was a lovely game for her. She could find them hidden in the toe of my son's nasty athletic shoes, stuffed down in the couch, up high on the mantle etc. without a problem. You wouldn't think that enough personal and volatile "smells" would be transferred to metal keys with a simple metal ring (no leather fob etc) that would be smellable, but man watching her initially sense and follow the gradient of smell to the source was very cool.

The only issue was that when a crisis happened and we had to leave *now*, and spouse's keys were nowhere to be found....doggo sensed the anxiety and wanted to fix that instead of finding the actual keys! She would "search" for 5seconds then come back and check on the anxiety level, then try again, then come back. It never really worked in practice....(But, oh my, she was *such* a good dog. The best ever.)

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dystopian's picture

Very cool rats, great work they are doing... amazing animals. We are probably lucky our olfactory sense is not so well developed? Most birds have a poor sense of smell but a few are great. Seabirds for example have very good sense of smell, to locate that rotting carcass or split open fish out in the middle of nowhere. The Turkey Vulture also uses smell to locate food. It's close relative the Black Vulture uses eyesight: it watches the Turkey Vultures. They buried a chicken carcass in leaf litter in Costa Rica, The TV's as birders call them were right on it. I see that here too, TV's respond quickly to unseen roadkill. Then the Black Vultures which are smaller but more aggressive push them off the find.

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We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.
Look deep into nature, and then you will understand everything better.
both - Albert Einstein