03-05-2025
Meet a 'Very Diligent' Rat Named Ronin Who Has Sniffed Out a Record-Breaking 109 Landmines in Cambodia
"He's a very hardworking rat," Cindy Fast, head of APOPO's training and research efforts, tells PEOPLE of the group's star landmine-sniffing rodent
Since 1979, nearly 20,000 people — many of them children — have been killed (and another 45,000 injured) by unexploded weapons in Cambodia
Experts estimate that there over 110 million active landmines — enough to circle the Earth twice — still buried in 60 countries
Let's face it, rats pretty much have one of the most miserable reputations of any member of the animal kingdom — hardly surprising due to their habit of living in sewers, spreading deadly diseases and eating rotting garbage. But every so often a rat comes along that bucks the trend and leads the kind of life that forces people to rethink everything they once took for granted about these creatures.
Which brings us to Ronin, a 5 1/2-year-old African giant pouched rat from Tanzania.
Since 2021, Ronin, who now lives in Cambodia's Preah Vihear Province, has used his insanely sensitive nose to sniff out 109 deadly landmines and 15 unexploded pieces of military weaponry that have spent decades buried in the ground.
'I don't know if you can call a rat hard working, but that's exactly what he is," Cindy Fast, head of training and research with the Belgian-based nonprofit APOPO, tells PEOPLE from her office in Morogoro, Tanzania. "Ever since he was a pup, he's just been a very quick learner and very diligent. He's one of our larger rats and is a really big fan of food. He's very, very motivated by food."
Ronin's feat — which eclipsed the record set by fellow bomb-sniffing rodent Magawa that involved 71 mines and 38 pieces of unexploded ordnance — recently landed him a Guinness World Records title.
In a statement about the achievement, Adam Millward, managing editor for the organization wrote: 'Guinness World Records feats aren't always just about smashing milestones—sometimes they can be about smashing preconceptions too. The life-changing results of APOPO's [rats], their handlers and all the people involved with training and caring for these incredible animals is a revelatory example of the good that can be achieved when humans and animals work together.'
In a country where the estimated six million landmines lurking in the topsoil have caused tens of thousands of deaths and countless amputations, Ronin's work is nothing short of heaven sent. Since 1979, nearly 20,000 people — many of them children — have been killed after accidentally stumbling upon landmines, and another 45,000 have been injured, according to the Cambodian Mine Action And Victim Assistance Authority.
The nation has the world's highest number of amputees per capita in the world. Even more frightening, researchers with APOPO estimate there are over 110 million active landmines—enough to circle the Earth twice—buried underground in 60 countries. 'Whether there's a mine [buried in a specific parcel of land] or not, so many people are living with a looming psychological threat,' says Fast. 'It's such a huge release to have that threat removed and know that an area is safe.'
Often these minefields are located adjacent to schools, which has poseed a deadly dilemma for generations of students. 'Every so often,' adds Fast, 'a ball will get loose and the kids end up drawing straws to see which student is going to be the brave one to go retrieve it from the minefield.'
Related: 'Hero Rat' Magawa Retires After Spending 5 Years Sniffing Out Landmines in Cambodia
The idea behind using rats to sniff out wartime explosives was hatched in 1995 from APOPO founder Bart Weetjens, who at the time was studying engineering in Belgium when he was tasked with finding a cost-efficient solution to a real-world problem for a class project. After stumbling upon a research paper detailing how a hamster had been trained to detect explosives, Weetjens — who had raised pet rats as a kid and was impressed by how clever they were — wondered if rodents might also be up to the task.
Clearly, they were. Since 1997, APOPO — which played a crucial role in helping the nation of Mozambique finally remove all of its known landmines in 2017 — has removed buried explosives from millions of square meters of land around the world. In 2016 they began sending their landmine-sniffing rats to Cambodia.
The group currently has 118 pouched rats in training or deployed for mine detection — with another 49 rats being used to detect tuberculosis in sputum samples in several African nations. Their sensitive noses, which can pick up the scent of a half drop of chlorine in an area the size of 20 Olympic swimming pools, are able to detect a trillionth of a gram of TNT in the buried explosives.
Even more importantly, the group's rodents — which are the size of small cats and weigh roughly four lbs. — aren't heavy enough to detonate the pressure-sensitive triggers on the landmines. 'We've never had a rat injured or killed in the line of duty,' says Fast.
Ronin spent nearly a year undergoing meticulous training, using pureed avocados and bananas as a reward, in Tanzania before being sent to Cambodia in 2021. Since then, he arises each morning before sunrise and — after having sunscreen applied to his easily sunburned ears and tail — he goes to work. Because of the extreme focus involved for his job, he only spends 12 minutes on the job before clocking out for the day.
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'The average rat goes for 20 minutes, but he's not easily distracted and once he gets his to-do list done for the day, he gets to go rest in the shade and just be a rat,' says Fast, who estimates Ronin has another two years of work in him before retiring. 'We make custom clay pots for them to sleep in that mimics their underground burrows. That's where you'll often find them flopped on their backs with the bellies up, just zonked out.'
To date, Ronin has cleared landmines from nearly 194,000 square meters — roughly the size of a thousand tennis courts — of land and shows no sign of slowing down. As for what sort of a bonus the record-setting rodent received after winning his Guinness honors on April 4 (which, of course, happens to be World Rat Day), it sounds like his handlers kept things fairly low key.
'I didn't get to the party,' says Fast, laughing. 'But I'm pretty sure he got an extra helping of bananas that day.'
Read the original article on People
