Mine sniffing rats

Washington Times:

Tell a New Yorker that rats can save lives and he might consider it an impossible trick for the beady-eyed sewer dwellers.

But for the past 10 years, a group of Belgian researchers based in Tanzania have been training a species of giant African rats to sniff out land mines and unexploded ordnance.

"When people see they can use these animals for humanitarian purposes, it changes their perception," said Bart Weetjens, whose nonprofit group, Apopo, has pioneered the use of the African or Gambian giant pouched rat in mine detection. "People find it most fascinating."

By teaching local residents how to handle the rats — a food source for some Africans — the group hopes to develop a cheap, reliable, indigenous resource for de-mining, an expensive and dangerous process that typically operates in unstable, war-ravaged regions.

...

The campaign, a grouping of about 1,400 nongovernmental organizations from 90 countries, issued a survey last year that listed more than two dozen African countries dealing with buried anti-personnel mines and mine contamination. The problem was especially acute in Angola, Mozambique, Sudan, Ethiopia and Eritrea.

Angola — along with Afghanistan, Cambodia and Colombia — is thought to have one of the world's most severe problems, with an estimated 7 million land mines hidden in unmarked fields four years after the end of a long civil war, the government said.

...

I would think they would be effective at discovering IED's too. I wonder why they have not been tried in Iraq?