Posted by wallflower 4/9/2025
Well that's what I remember reading some years ago anyway. I guess a dog would keep going if you made a fuss of him, but you don't want to go over to the middle of the minefield to do that.
Small mammals typically don't have a lot of endurance. Dogs and humans are kind of outliers there, as we specifically evolved for persistence hunting.
It's probably just due to mass and ease of training.
I'm no longer sure it is accurate. Looking at their website APOPO now actually use dogs as well. They say that rats and dogs are complementary, but they give an advantage of the dogs but not of the rats
Also, I ran across this article criticising the rats effectiveness: https://nolandmines.com/APOPO%20rats.html . I have no way to assess it's accuracy.
Luckily, I never had to go mine-hunting.
But the way: The landmines very likely contain TNT. But this is not what the rat detects. Landmines don't smell like TNT...
This means that if something bad happens, say death of multiple animals due to disease or unfortunate accident. The replacement can arrive much sooner.
The downside is that you have to replace them much more often. But the positives outweigh negatives.
>What is the activation weight of a landmine?
Several kilograms. Children trigger the mines. So a large or a medium dog would usually too.
Given the amount of work to be done after the current war, i'd bet on mass use of flying and ground drones with bomb detectors.