Miss Marple has a remarkable nose for danger. She is a rat, and she detects landmines by smelling them. She was born in the training lab of the Belgian company Apopo in Tanzania. Here, African giant rats—the size of a cat—are taught to sniff out explosives hidden in the ground. After a year’s training, she is sent on her first mission to neighboring Mozambique, whose 30 years of war have left millions of mines hidden in the earth. A whole unit of rats walks delicately back and forth over the minefields, attached to lines. When they’ve finished, the fields are safe again. Hundreds of lives have been saved, and thousands of crippling injuries avoided. Miss Marple is a true hero rat!

Giant rats are clever and they learn fast. Their sense of smell is better than a dog’s, they have more stamina, and they’re a lot cheaper to train. Apopo’s founder Bert Weetjens makes use of their natural instincts. They are curious and always looking for food. They store whatever they find in their cheeks and bring it home. And because they constantly update the map in their brains, they never get lost. Perfect raw skills that can be honed to work with new scents.

First, trainer Niko Saroni must get the newborn Miss Marple accustomed to him. then he gradually acquaints her with the smell of explosives—in the labs, and then with defused mines in the fields. Even a talented rat needs a year to master the skills. Finally, it’s off to the former war zones.

Mines kill 50 people around the world every day. And there are a hundred million of them still to be found.

Seventy trainers and carers are employed at Apopo’s labs in Morogoro, Tanzania. Their first task is to overcome local prejudice. In East Africa, rats are seen as crop-seating pests. But the rats will do anything for bananas, avocados, or nuts—even find mines!

Bert Weetjens is a confirmed rat fan. He’s even thought up other challenges for them: identifying tuberculosis bacteria in human saliva far faster than any human technician could. And if you fit a mini-camera on their back, they can even search for people trapped in collapsed buildings.

This film follows Miss Marple and Niko through the training course in the lab and the early tests. We are with Miss Marple each time she gets the hang of another part of her perilous work. It’s a long and hard training, full of surprises, until the day comes when she can finally fulfill her mission.

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