[HN Gopher] Cambodia unveils a statue of famous landmine-sniffin...
___________________________________________________________________
Cambodia unveils a statue of famous landmine-sniffing rat Magawa
Author : speckx
Score : 234 points
Date : 2026-04-07 17:23 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.bbc.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.bbc.com)
| sheikhnbake wrote:
| RIP Magawa
| dennis_jeeves2 wrote:
| I spent the last minute observing in silence, in memory of this
| remarkable creature. HN sheep, I command thee all, to do the
| same.
| gfna wrote:
| I did. Also, I think i needed this bit of news today.
| pancakemouse wrote:
| 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/
| monster_group wrote:
| 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.
| ge96 wrote:
| 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
| thinkingtoilet wrote:
| 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.
| delecti wrote:
| 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.
| jasonwatkinspdx wrote:
| Also, 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.
| vvpan wrote:
| From "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!
| dtsykunov wrote:
| > 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.
| caseyohara wrote:
| 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.
| beAbU wrote:
| Just missing the "controversies" and "personal life"
| sections!
| frereubu wrote:
| "Alleged embezzlement of soft fruit"
| gavmor wrote:
| How does one rat mentor another?
| dtsykunov wrote:
| My guess, first they send them links to confluence wiki.
| fmbb wrote:
| All deprecated pages with outdated info of course. But the
| comments have links to Slack threads about the incorrect
| info.
| pimlottc wrote:
| "Feel free to update the wiki to correct anything you
| find that's outdated"
| thinkingtoilet wrote:
| 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.
| sonofhans wrote:
| 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.
| lostlogin wrote:
| Our dog learned to find tennis balls by smell off a dog
| that was good at it. This was after me one walk with this
| dog.
|
| Every trip to the park got us a few.
|
| Then he ate one and have himself a bowel obstruction and me
| a great enthusiasm for pet insurance.
| tedmiston wrote:
| RatGPT
| yzydserd wrote:
| Human in the loop reinforcement learning
| mrandish wrote:
| More specifically, fruit in the loop reinforcement
| learning.
| ballooney wrote:
| 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?
| lapetitejort wrote:
| Sounds like the obsession of reinventing trains and trees.
| Surely training a rat is cheaper than a portable real-time NMR
| device, right?
| sonofhans wrote:
| Rats are sentient beings. If we have a choice, it's not
| ethical to risk their lives to meet our own goals.
| lapetitejort wrote:
| Before 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-
| estima...
| ks2048 wrote:
| 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...
| the-grump wrote:
| These are the creatures we kill with poison and carry experiments
| on.
| 3eb7988a1663 wrote:
| 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...
| the-grump wrote:
| 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.
| edm0nd wrote:
| Correct. 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 wrote:
| 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.
| ThrowawayTestr wrote:
| From what I've read from rat owners, the worst thing about
| owning a rat is their short lifespans.
| cdrnsf wrote:
| 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.
| quirkot wrote:
| 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
| Rendello wrote:
| Another comment pointed out that a at least one de-mining
| expert is skeptical:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47680882
| mikkupikku wrote:
| Rats are incredible animals, and this is a well deserved honor.
| jampekka wrote:
| Sadly 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 wrote:
| Is that their fault or is there maybe a giant reason nearby why
| they are doing this?
| jampekka wrote:
| Whatever 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 wrote:
| Would 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 wrote:
| 161 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?
| BurningFrog wrote:
| With an expansive Russia next door it's hard to forego
| effective defense measures.
| jampekka wrote:
| I'm in Finland and I would have forgone this measure. It is
| not a critical, or even an important, part of the defence
| strategy.
| ajb wrote:
| One demining expert claims that the rats are actually no good,
| but the charity persists with them anyway:
| https://nolandmines.com/APOPO%20rats.html
|
| I have no expertise. His arguments sound very plausible though.
| catlikesshrimp wrote:
| This 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.
| cjkaminski wrote:
| Finally, 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 wrote:
| What 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.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2026-04-07 23:00 UTC)