Wednesday, June 16, 2010

Finding landmines.

You can train animals to find landmines.

As landmines come in a variety of colors, shapes, and sizes, they can be extremely difficult to find. Usually they are made to blend in with the ground, to completely surprise the unfortunate soul who walks upon them.

Millions of active landmines still exist in many post-conflict settings.

Active mines in post-conflict settings pose a great danger to many innocent civilians trying to piece back their homes and families. Many of the mines are small and look like toys; curious children are often the victims of mine explosions because they come across the small, shiny objects and want to know what they do.

During a recent lecture about landmines and the international efforts to find and cease the creation of these tiny death mines, our lecturer, Cameron Macauley, explained the use of dogs in finding landmines. Landmine seeking dogs, like seeing eye dogs, cost about ten thousand dollars to train, are very cute, and are dedicated to their work. When I asked how the trainers could put the dogs in such danger (dogs often die in the line of duty as they cannot see the trip wires that are often connected to anti-personnel mines), Cameron simply said, "they like what they do."

I just could not imagine a cute little mutt risking his life to pick up after some untidy combatants.

The next slide, however, was about training bees to find landmines. It is so cool.

Apparently, you can put the scent of dynamite in bee food. Not only are the bees extremely responsive, it is fairly cost-effective to train bees. Once they have been trained, the bees are released in fields that have been identified as mined. The bees swarm toward the scent of the dynamite and then the de-mining team knows where the mines are located.

I thought this was awesome and, under my breath said, "that is so cool."

My professor turned around, looked at me, and said, "Naomi, bees have rights, too."

I turned red. Monica, my professor, was right. But for some reason, the rights of bees did not cross my mind when I heard you could train them to find remnants of dirty wars.

In the coming months I will be moving to Mozambique. Mozambique's civil war, which ended in the 1990s, left thousands of active landmines throughout the country. Since the war is now over in Mozambique, the only victims of these mines are civilians, mostly children. Though there are efforts in Mozambique, and around the world, to find and disarm landmines, efforts to find and destroy these landmines are slow, as it is an extremely time-intensive and dangerous process. To find out more about landmines, please visit http://www.icbl.org/intro.php.

I don't know if I will train any bees in Mozambique, but if I do, I will not take their rights for granted.