> 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

End to life worthy of being envied.

I 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), I rabbit holed wikipedia about landmine-sniffing animals. It's such a fascinating topic.

Just missing the "controversies" and "personal life" sections!

"Alleged embezzlement of soft fruit"

How does one rat mentor another?

My guess, first they send them links to confluence wiki.

You can teach a kid to change a tire without saying a word. It’s the same thing. Rats are very smart and very social. Rats that were good at teaching Rathood to their little ones had more that survived.

Put food in a maze and I’m sure rats would teach other rats how to get it. I expect this is similar.

Rats are intelligent social mammals. They teach by actions. Imagine training a dog. You have two dogs, one trained and one not. You say "sit" and the trained dog sits and you give it a treat. The non-trained dog will quickly pick up on that.

Stark 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.

I 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

I 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.

Yep. 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.

Sadly demand for 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.

If 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/

I spent the last minute observing in silence, in memory of this remarkable creature. HN sheep, I command thee all, to do the same.

I did. Also, I think i needed this bit of news today.

Wonder 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.

From what I've read from rat owners, the worst thing about owning a rat is their short lifespans.

RIP 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.

Magawa 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

These are the creatures we kill with poison and carry experiments on.

Those 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_mou...

Well 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.

Rats are incredible animals, and this is a well deserved honor.

RIP Magawa

I 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?

There 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-le...

Sounds like the obsession of reinventing trains and trees. Surely training a rat is cheaper than a portable real-time NMR device, right?

Rats are sentient beings. If we have a choice, it’s not ethical to risk their lives to meet our own goals.