Thai Elephant Steps on Landmine.
A 22-year old Thai elephant was injured when he wandered into Myanmar and stepped on a landmine.
The elephant is now at a rehab facility while veterinarians try to repair the damage to his badly mangled foot. The hospital treating the elephant says that this is the fourteenth such injury on an elephant they’ve seen since 1993.
Anti-landmine coalitions have said the areas around Myanmar have “extensive” landmine contamination. The weapons are a threat to both innocent animals and local people. In 2008 alone, 721 people were killed by stepping on landmines near Myanmar.
A sad reminder that wars affect everyone, not just those who choose to wage them.
[photo from the AP]
HeroRat
Olfaction is the primary sensory modality of rats, as they have an extraordinarily high number of functional genes related to odor detection, giving them a keen sense of smell. APOPO trains African Pouched rats to use their exceptional sense of smell for humanitarian purposes. Through operant conditioning, the rats are trained at the headquarters of APOPO in Tanzania to work in one of three disciplines: landmine detection, tuberculosis detection, or remote scent tracing. It takes approximately nine months and 6,000 € to fully train a rat.
