Magawa received the Medal of Courage
Magawa, the rat famous for its ability to sniff and detect mines and who was awarded a gold medal for his heroic actions in this regard, has died at the age of eight.
In its five-year career, the rodent has discovered more than 100 landmines and other explosives in Cambodia.
One of the most successful rats was Magawa, which was trained by the Belgian charity Abobo to alert mine workers so that they might be removed safely.
The charity said the giant African rat “died in peace” over the weekend.
She added that Magawa was in good health and “spent most of the past week playing with his usual enthusiasm.” But by the end of the week “his movement started to slow down and he started sleeping more and showed less interest in food in his last days.”
Magawa underwent a year of training in Tanzania, where he was raised, before moving to Cambodia to begin his bomb-sniffing career. There are believed to be as many as six million landmines in the Southeast Asian country.
Magawa was trained to detect a chemical compound inside the explosives, and surveyed more than 141,000 square meters of land – the equivalent of 20 football fields.
The rat weighed 1.2 kilograms and was 70 centimeters long. Although much larger than many other species of rats, Magawa was small and light enough not to detonate mines when he walked over them.
Magawa was able to finish searching a court the size of a tennis court in just 20 minutes – something Abobo says would take a person with a metal detector between one to four days.
Mine-detector rat receives a gold medal
In 2020, Magawa received a gold medal from the BDSA Foundation for Animals “for his dedication to saving lives”. Magawa was the first rat to receive the medal in the charity’s 77-year history.
The rat retired last June, following it “slowed down” as it reached old age.
“All of us in Abobo feel the loss of Magawa and are grateful for the wonderful work he has done,” the charity said in a statement.
She added that his “amazing sense of smell” allowed “communities in Cambodia to live, work and play without fear of losing a life or a limb.”
Abobo has been raising her animals – known as hero rats or “hero rats” – to detect landmines since the 1990s.
