If that works as advertised, there should be plenty of other areas to clear afterwards. Hell, my brother-in-law spent two years in Kosovo (as a UN peacekeeper) a few years back. He said that even then there were large areas of land that were still off-limits to people because of uncleared mines.

Despite the danger, and the warning signs, some locals are desperate enough to seek arable land where ever they can. One can only imagine what happens when they hit a 10-year old mine.

I was told it's not pretty.

They've actually been sending these rats to a lot of countries: http://www.apopo.org/en/mine-action/about

Most of those countries have been warmer regions, but it might be worth looking into the feasibility and funding for places like the former Yugoslavia.

Landmines and ordnance are not just a problem in Kosovo, the rest of former Yugoslavia still has its problems with contaminated forests and agriculture areas.

Oh yes indeed. When I was cycling (and camping) in the less-often-visited-by-tourists areas of Croatia and Bosnia in 2011, there were mine warning signs all over the place. I even had to wait for an hour while a demining team cleared a roadside so that roadworks could commence.

In the Croatian wars, with its long and hard to guard front lines, the mines were more or less shoveled out of trucks , with little in the way of administration. To make matters worse, when the spring floods came and eroded the riverbanks (the river systems, during the wars, were less well-maintained), they took the mines buried there with them, and so they ended up in other places alongside the rivers.

The Croatian government has a GIS webapp up at https://misportal.hcr.hr/ . I used it to mark my paper map with a sharpie, so I would know in which areas I'd better not pitch my tent. The mined areas (in red) viewable through the webapp show the contours of the breakaway ethnic-Serbian "Republika Srpska Krajina" pretty well. (The stuff to the far eastern side of the map is the border front with Serbia and has nothing to do with the Krajina contours).

It amazed me to find these areas still so devastated and deserted. Bombed out houses everywhere, even in town centres (notably Pakrac), where the young people I spoke to who were working and living in these scarred towns hadn't even been born when the fighting started (early 90's, I remember we had a refugee in our class in primary school.).

Rats (and dogs) still seem to be "state of the art" in the detection of chemicals.

Both the rats and the dogs scale very poorly, though. Maybe training rats via AI would improve that? Human labor in Africa is cheap, so automation doesn't really save wages, but it could improve how much you know about the reliability of the rats, and thus you could train more numerous and more reliable rats.

This does not give me a lot of optimism:

"Last year, Apopo received international funding of $4.5m (£2.7m) from various donors and cleared 618 acres of mined land in Mozambique."

There are 640 acres in a square mile, so this is like $5 million per square mile cleared.

They are working in lots of other locations besides just Mozambique. They are also good at sniffing out whether a sputum sample is positive for TB! Check out their website. I've been giving them money for several years now. They were featured in an article in the NYTimes (http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/17/opinion/17kristof.html), a list of different ideas for Father's Day gifts. My dad got a kick out of it.

This idea seems to be taking a long time to be put into use. I read about it in 2004 - here's an interview talking about rats, dogs, and bees http://www.irinnews.org/indepthmain.aspx?InDepthId=19&Report...

Here's a page with a bit more information about rat demining including some video http://allafrica.com/view/group/main/main/id/00028535.html

Yeah, not surprising though. It's one of those things where 99.9% clear means a few children blown up every now and then. Having a field with "hardly any mines" really isn't good enough, so I can imagine it would take a long time to vet new procedures.

Not so uncommon although this one has the ultimate goal of "detonating" land mines rather than simply detecting them: "...offered the U.S. forces a large number of monkeys, some from Morocco's Atlas Mountains and others imported, to use them for detonating land mines planted by the Iraqis."

Source: http://www.upi.com/Business_News/Security-Industry/2003/03/2...

The problem with detonating mines, is that it only gets the ones that works 100%. So you might still have some left with partly broken triggers. Doesn't mean they won't blow up later, though.

UXO (unexploded ordnance) remains a problem quite after the fact. A gentleman in Virginia became the latest casualty of the Civil War in 2008 due to a naval artillery shell.

The house my mother grew up in, and the block surrounding it, had to get evacuated twice. You wouldn't naturally think Pulaski Street in Chicago would be a great place to find bombs but you aren't counting on my grandfather, who twice had a shell land in his foxhole on Iwo Jima and fail to explode. Believing them to be his lucky charms, he brought them home with him after the war and put them in his basement, next to his collection of nails.

The CPD bomb squad said, after disarming the second one, "If he has a third one down here, it is your problem."

Far more cost-effective would be cloning ឯកសារ (Aki-Ra).

http://www.badassoftheweek.com/aki-ra.html

Rodents Of Unusual Size? I don't think they exist...