6 ms·
Cambodia unveils statue to honour famous landmine-sniffing rat
- ValveFan6969 7mo ago[dead]
- sheikhnbake 7mo agoRIP Magawa
- dennis_jeeves2 7mo agoI spent the last minute observing in silence, in memory of this remarkable creature. HN sheep, I command thee all, to do the same.
- gfna 7mo agoI did. Also, I think i needed this bit of news today.
- pancakemouse 7mo agoIf you visit Siem Reap, you can visit the APOPO visitor centre, and see the rats (and a demonstration!) for yourself. Highly recommended. - http://apopo.org/support-us/apopo-visitor-center/ http://apopo.org/support-us/apopo-visitor-center/
- monster_group 7mo agoStark reminder of how precious and meaningful a life can be - of any creature, no matter how small. We should be nice to all creatures not just humans.
- ge96 7mo agoI was recently at a wet lands were there were hundreds of thousands of snow geese making the lake white and blackening the sky, crazy to see and yeah we are blessed with the ability to change the entire Earth, the other guys are just along for the ride
- fwipsy 7mo agoBeaver dams change ecosystems. The Earth has oxygen due to cyanobacteria. Pedantically, all living beings change the Earth. But it certainly seems like we're the ones making the biggest changes at the moment.
- thinkingtoilet 7mo agoI agree. However, you get insane push back the second you start to mention veganism. And yes, that is a luxury and there large parts of the world where that's not an option, but if you're reading this comment you probably could survive without eating meat.
- delecti 7mo agoYep. Another great example of this is any discussion where datacenter resource usage gets brought up. Mention how much water someone's ChatGPT queries takes and people will generally agree it's a problem. Mention how much water their burger takes and at best you'll get people hemming and hawing about protein or indigenous cultures or their cousin's friend who went vegan and got really sick.
- jasonwatkinspdx 7mo agoAlso, I personally think framing it as a binary or quasi religious decision is counterproductive. I was vegetarian for some years, before ultimately deciding I just run better on an omnivore diet. But for environmental and ethical reasons I decided to make meat more of a side dish vs the center of the meal, and to mostly eat chicken vs more high environmental impact animal proteins like beef. I think a lot of people that would never go full vegan can do well on this sort of less meat middle road.
- fwipsy 7mo agoHot take: people get angry about veganism because they suspect, deep down, that vegans are right and feel guilty about eating meat. (Not taking the moral high ground here - I have put approximately zero effort into reducing meat intake at all.)
- thinkingtoilet 7mo agoVegas are objectively right. I eat mostly vegan but still eat other stuff from time to time. I look at those times as me being selfish. I am an imperfect person and the vegans are right.
- vvpan 7mo agoFrom "Loving-Kindness (Metta) Sutta" of the Buddhist Pali Canon: In gladness and in safety, May all beings be at ease. Whatever living beings there may be; Whether they are weak or strong, omitting none, The great or the mighty, medium, short or small, The seen and the unseen, Those living near and far away, Those born and to-be-born — May all beings be at ease!
- bluefirebrand 7mo agoIt's a really nice sentiment, but it makes me sad. We're barely even nice to humans, mostly It's downright miraculous when we respect a non-human life enough to honor it like this This rat will be remembered for longer than I will, that's for sure
- aziaziazi 7mo agoThere’s no point to be sad: even trees get remembered and honoured. Human’s humanity have no such "compassion contingent”: loving a new child doesn’t take the love out of the precedents. Some antispeciesist (and others) argue that giving more compassion to animals is a step to develop one’s compassion to others being, hence being nicer to others humans. On the opposite: accepting an horrendous practices toward non-humans animals makes ones more prone to accept horrendous practice toward humans.
- dtsykunov 7mo ago> Magawa retired from bomb sniffing in June 2021 owing to his old age, as is standard for APOPO's HeroRATs. > He spent a number of weeks mentoring 20 newly-recruited rats before ultimately retiring to a life of "snacking on bananas and peanuts". > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magawa https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magawa End to life worthy of being envied.
- caseyohara 7mo agoI love that Magawa's wikipedia article is structured just like a human: Early Life, Career, Retirement and Death. A few weeks ago when "Croatia declared free of landmines after 31 years" was posted here (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47189535 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47189535), I rabbit holed wikipedia about landmine-sniffing animals. It's such a fascinating topic.
- beAbU 7mo agoJust missing the "controversies" and "personal life" sections!
- frereubu 7mo ago"Alleged embezzlement of soft fruit"
- SilentM68 7mo agoAh, RatKablooey. Yeah, that’s the nickname they gave the old bomb-sniffing rat. Guy was a legend… or at least, that’s what the reports said. His “bomb count” was so high, even the military started double-checking the math when his stats became too explosive for the spreadsheet. Rumor has it that half the “bombs he found” were just suspiciously shaped cheese wrappers. Retired with a medal, a tiny cape, and a lifetime supply of peanuts. Still shows up at reunions, mostly to argue about the “official count,” and reminisce with his old field commander, Agent Cody Banks.
- gavmor 7mo agoHow does one rat mentor another?
- ballooney 7mo agoI don’t like this site’s obsession with reducing everything to market opportunities, but… it’s extremely well documented that land mines, white truffles, cancer, diabetes, chemical weapons, etc can all be ‘sniffed’ by animals and it’s a mechanism that is almost always ‘better’ (cheaper, quicker, more deployable in the field) than human-engineered solutions. Surely there’s some vebture capital opportunity here for better sensors that would unarguably improve our lot more than AI, at least per dollar invested?
- lapetitejort 7mo agoSounds like the obsession of reinventing trains and trees. Surely training a rat is cheaper than a portable real-time NMR device, right?
- sonofhans 7mo agoRats are sentient beings. If we have a choice, it’s not ethical to risk their lives to meet our own goals.
- lapetitejort 7mo agoBefore focusing on rats, who are too light to set off mines and live long pampered lives, I would focus on the 73 million pigs and 87 million cows in factory farms [0]. [0]: https://www.sentienceinstitute.org/us-factory-farming-estimates https://www.sentienceinstitute.org/us-factory-farming-estima...
- ks2048 7mo agoThere has certainly been work on it, but not sure what the status is. Of course, it could be very useful. From Google, 2019, https://research.google/blog/learning-to-smell-using-deep-learning-to-predict-the-olfactory-properties-of-molecules/ https://research.google/blog/learning-to-smell-using-deep-le...
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- the-grump 7mo agoThese are the creatures we kill with poison and carry experiments on.
- 3eb7988a1663 7mo agoThose mice have a sculpture as well[0]. Nobody likes experimenting on animals, but it is use mice or orphans in third world countries. In silico and computational models are just not a good enough analogue for the human body. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monument_to_the_laboratory_mouse https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monument_to_the_laboratory_mou...
- the-grump 7mo agoWell it's good to be honest, and so I commend you on that. So the hierarchy is - our kids - "third-world orphans" - other species For what it's worth, I'm not denying the benefit we obtain by testing on animals, nor am I suggesting that we live surrounded by rodents that we know to be vectors for multiple diseases that would affect us. The comment above was merely an observation on the value of life and how little attention we pay to it. We subject sentient beings to untold amounts of horror every day, and we are completely destroying the balance of life on earth with a system that is entirely devoted to serving humans--individual humans, not humanity. The statue is not the point. The point is what this little creature did and how we might learn to show mercy and respect to our fellow sentient beings.
- edm0nd 7mo agoCorrect. These are the creatures that will ruin your home/barn if infested with them. Source: recently finished getting rid of a rat infestation in my barn. they also reproduce at a crazy rate. Some poison + getting two barn cats = problem solved.
- salad-tycoon 7mo agoWonder how hard it would be to train for diabetes? My under 10yo was just diagnosed with T1DM, a pocket rat sounds like fun and cheaper than a dog which is priced at unobtainium prices for us. Animals are awesome, land mines are not. I hope we can avoid ever bringing that to our shores. Sadly, I know we now have air-mines (drones) so guess someone has to come up with drone sniffing pidgins or something (though obviously a parked drone probably doesn’t persist as long as a buried stationary mine and a flying drone less so). War sucks.
- ThrowawayTestr 7mo agoFrom what I've read from rat owners, the worst thing about owning a rat is their short lifespans.
- cdrnsf 7mo agoRIP Magawa. Animals are wonderful. My grandmother had seizures for the latter part of her life and her doctors were unable to determine the root cause. A Great Dane mix her and my grandfather rescued was able to sense when one a fit was coming on and would lean on her until she was lying down and safe.
- quirkot 7mo agoMagawa cleared 1,517,711 sq.ft of land. He could work at a pace of 2,808 sq.ft (a doubles tennis court) every 20 minutes. If he maintained that pace, he worked 180.2 hours. Let's assume, with hazardous terrain, he worked 25% that speed on average. If that's the case he worked ~720 hours during a 5-6 year career. A different rat, Ronin, that found more stuff found a total of 124 explosive devices. So Magawa found no more than 1 explosive for every 5 hours and 45 minutes of searching. Or approximately one device every 17.25 tennis courts of searching. Real needle in a haystack stuff, wow
- Rendello 7mo agoAnother comment pointed out that a at least one de-mining expert is skeptical: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47680882 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47680882
- mikkupikku 7mo agoRats are incredible animals, and this is a well deserved honor.
- jampekka 7mo agoSadly demand for such heros may increase in the future. Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Ukraine and Finland withdrew from the Ottawa Treaty banning personnel mines. And probably more countries will follow.
- caycep 7mo agoIs that their fault or is there maybe a giant reason nearby why they are doing this?
- jampekka 7mo agoWhatever the reason, this will increase the likelihood of landmine casualties in the future. And not necessarily (only) in this area, but it weakens the treaty in general. Part of these kinds of treaties is to accept some additional difficulty or expenses in defence for a more widespread benefit. I'm living in Finland and I would have accepted these.
- nickff 7mo agoWould you expect other countries to come to Finland’s aid if the country had declined to employ all the ‘force-multipliers’ that were available to it? I would not expect other countries to come to Finland’s aid if Finland had made such decisions.
- jampekka 7mo ago161 countries are still in the Ottawa Treaty, including all European countries except the ones who withdrew. I have hard time seeing how this treaty would have much effect on wartime alliances. But if that's the case, what are "all the force multipliers"? Chemical weapons? Biological weapons? What share of the GDP for defence?
- nickff 7mo agoIt's nice that so many countries are signatories, but the countries which are currently involved in significant conflicts, have been, or are likely to be, are all non-signatories, have withdrawn, or are not abiding by their commitment. I'm not sure how much it matters that many non-warring countries are signatories to the convention, unless you think the Ottawa Treaty has actually prevented one or more conflicts (which I doubt). I find some of the signatories laughable, as both sides in the Russia-Ukraine conflict have used them (with Ukraine being a signatory), while countries like Palestine and Eritrea have committed egregious human rights violations (since assenting), so I don't trust any commitment of theirs. With respect to chemical and biological weapons, I think the reason they're not widely used is that they're relatively ineffective, and inconvenient, so I don't think they're a force-multiplier at all. Russia & Syria's (likely) uses of chemical weapons seem like more of a (mostly ineffective) desperate gamble than a brilliant move, though they demonstrate the non-existent consequences to such violations of treaty obligations.
- ajb 7mo agoOne demining expert claims that the rats are actually no good, but the charity persists with them anyway: https://nolandmines.com/APOPO%20rats.html https://nolandmines.com/APOPO%20rats.html I have no expertise. His arguments sound very plausible though.
- catlikesshrimp 7mo agoThis is the most technical post, and it will go almost unnoticed. A cool story about a rat or a dog draws more attention than mines which were missed and maimed people years after searching the field. Anyways, the author of that piece is a little mad, but in the sense that it is worth serious consideration. TLDR: the rats aren't cost effective and, worst of all, haven't scientifically proved to be effective.
- pyuser583 7mo agoIt sounds weird there is a pro-rat constituency.
- BirAdam 7mo agoI too have no expertise here, but I've known quite a few rodents. So... my amateur take: I do not think that the area would necessarily need to be cleared of debris first. Rats can get places people would never imagine they could quite easily. What I did find to be consistent with rodents is the difficulty in getting them to use set search patterns and such. Rodents go where and how rodents go, and I've never found it possible to teach them set routes. They get a whiff and tend to go right at whatever they smelled in contrast to dogs who can be taught to take set routes/patterns. The "distance from the nose" wouldn't matter. Rodents can often smell stuff that's around a mile away... a few inches of dirt (most landmines are under fewer than 25cm of dirt, anti-tank mines under fewer than 30cm) wouldn't be sufficient to deter them. Reliably signaling humans depends upon the particular rodent. Rodents have personalities, and they will often make very particular signals to their people in response to particular things. Reliably enough to bet a life on it? Not sure, but I don't think they'd be terrible in that regard.
- Fluorescence 7mo ago
- cjkaminski 7mo agoFinally, some excellent news that honors the contributions of a (once) living creature that made the world a better place (presumably without conflicting ulterior motives).
- donbrae 7mo agoWhat a hero. Rats are so smart. I previously asked what I think was an official account on Instagram and was relieved that the rats are apparently too light to set off the mines.
- neom 7mo agoIf you're into rats, here is a playlist with 6+ hours of rats doing tricks: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLGThSDBAdLEKFkcKeHc0DWsCx6zT5Hv-t https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLGThSDBAdLEKFkcKeHc0D... Rats are so awesome, we just need to GMO them to live longer.
- esprehn 7mo agoI just can't help but imagine those long lived rats escaping and taking over our cities. We already struggle with the rat population and they only live 3 years, imagine if they lived 15. Also I love rats and totally agree they're tough pets because they don't live long enough. We had many of them growing up and spent a fortune removing tumors.
- jacquesm 7mo agoSome of the rats live to 80, sometimes 90 years old.
- srean 7mo agoI had no idea. I thought rats would make great pets but the idea that you get attached to a guy who would die in a couple years is quite discouraging. You updated my knowledge. My grandmother had an African grey parrot she had inherited from someone.
- jacquesm 7mo agoHey there, sorry to confuse you but that was a bit of a joke, real rats max lifespan is 7, but we have those other rats that will live to 80 or even 90... But yes, the parrot issue is real, people will get those without thinking for even a second about how old they can get. We have one in our family that has outlived three owners.
- srean 7mo agoAh! Thanks for clarifying.
- downboots 7mo agoFever dream interview question: 100 landmines are cleared per hero rat. How many rats needed to restore peace in Eurasia?
- hackable_sand 7mo agoWe have drones now which are cheap and recyclable. But it takes humans to decide how much work we're going to make for ourselves. No one likes those shitty kids that keep making messes because they are entitled or angry.
- downboots 7mo agoWhat?
- teleforce 7mo agoI think instead of cloning on a static meaningless statue, much better if we clone Magawa in term of functionality and cabability, and name the landmine detection machine device Magawa. Japanese researchers have already successful in detecting sub-surface bamboo shoots for culinary, because young bamboo shoot underneath the ground taste better than apparent overground ones. Let's invent a landmines detection robotic device namely MAGAWA for Mines Apparatus Ground Assessment Waveform Analysis.
- glass1122 7mo ago[dead]
- amatecha 7mo agoAwesome! As soon as I saw "landmine-sniffing rat" I knew it must be Magawa!! He even has a book! https://www.albertwhitman.com/book/herorat/ https://www.albertwhitman.com/book/herorat/
- Synaesthesia 7mo agoLand-mines, particularly anti-personnel land minds are just horrible weapons. They should be banned.
- bluealienpie 7mo agoThere is a concrete numbers of dollars needed to functionally demine Cambodia, and it's in the low billions of dollars. They have highly effective teams, and you can directly contribute by visiting museum. https://www.cambodialandminemuseum.org/ https://www.cambodialandminemuseum.org/
- ImHereToVote 7mo agoWait. How did Cambodia end up with so many mines and explosives in the first place?
- Pay08 7mo agoWar with Vietnam in the 70s.
- ImHereToVote 7mo agoSo Vietnam put those ordnances there, those bastards.
- Pay08 7mo agoNo, all sides in that war (it kicked off the Cambodian civil war, so there were a lot of sides) used landmines.
- dojopico 7mo agoDonations to APOPO can be made at apopo.org. I was at the APOPO Visitors Center in Cambodia last year when the Trump administration eliminated all USAID funding for APOPO. The bombs being removed by APOPO in S.E. Asia were dropped by the U.S. during the Nixon and Johnson presidencies.
- antman 7mo agoI recently visited the facility near Angor Wat Cambodia. Its a facility with a lot of promotional matetial and have greatbway of presentong themselves. I had a demo presentation with a rat doing demining so some observations: The rats are big. The idea is that they smell mines and are more useful than dogs since they are less than 5kg which detonates the mines. They are also better than human since they can smell old mines that are under soil or plants after so many decades. Unfortunate that is very labor intensive since there are two people escorting each rat and handle it with tethers. For those reasons their effectiveness is limited. A few km up the same road is the Cambodian Landmine Museum that has a couple of demo gardens where one can spectacularly fail find Lamdimes Found like 10 amd they were like one hundred, 2 right next to me…. Unfortunately that place which is run by a person called Aki Ra although having done a lot more work gets less financing.
- OhioMan2943 7mo agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PDSA_Gold_Medal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PDSA_Gold_Medal For all of the recipients. Tearing up a bit reading stories of courage that will never get the same recognition just because they weren't born a human.
- shevy-java 7mo agoSome have statues of rats. Others have statues of cats. And others have statues of a mad clown king. To each their own. We here have a few old statues mostly from people who won in "glorious wars". While the statues look ok (though, aged), at one point in time I wondered why we glorify these folks. I then concluded that statues showing humans is a rather outdated concept, IMO. Some of this is history though, but it is still outdated.
- enos_feedler 7mo agoIf you visit Siem Reap there is a museum and interactive demos of this whole process. You can even hold one of the rats. It was pretty fascinating!
- m3kw9 7mo agoi assure you if we have enough resources, rats will have rights.