Rats have the best sense of smell, probably more than any other species of mammals. This is something that helps them to avoid predators and other natural enemies. Because of the relatively poor sight, particularly in the dark, being able to sniff the volatile substances emitted by different natural enemies enables them to run and avoid them or keep away from a dangerous environment.
The ability to sniff different types of smell is also advantageous for identifying the right and nutritious foods and to avoid poisons which have been purposely placed to kill them. ACE IRPM &BTD (RatTech) realized early on that this special sniffing trait in rodents could be exploited in many ways to our advantage. One very successful application is the use of rats (Hero Rats) to sniff out landmines left behind in the ground after wars in various parts of the world.
To date, hero rats, which are trained to sniff land mines have been deployed in Mozambique, Angola and Cambodia where millions of acres of land which were heavily mined and too dangerous for farming, grazing etc. have been opened for these activities.
The story does not end there. Sniffing the bacteria that causes tuberculosis enables trained rats to diagnose the disease in human sputum at the rate of 6-7 sputa per minute or about 42 sputa in 7 minutes. A trained technician using microscopy will be able to do 42 specimens in one full working day. Still there are many other potential applications that are feasible including the diagnosis of other diseases such Salmonellosis (caused by the bacteria, Salmonella species), detection of illegal concealment, transportation and exportation of endangered species such as Pangolins, etc.
Everyone knows that when they keep a cat in the house rats disappear. Traditionally all over the world, and particularly in Africa and Asia cats are kept to keep away rats from the house. The main question we asked was “Do rats disappear because they are eaten by the cats or they simply keep away from the house because of the fear of being killed for lunch by cats?” We had the evidence that many were killed by cats but also some evidence that if there were five rats in a house probably only two were killed but the others simply disappeared. So the question was why do they disappear? How could they recognize the presence of a cat even when the cat was not insight and was not making any noise to warn the rats? With these unanswered questions we did some investigations on potential volatiles coming from the bodies of cats that the rats were able to sniff and avoid these predators
