Discussion
Cambodia unveils statue to honour famous landmine-sniffing rat
sheikhnbake: RIP Magawa
dtsykunov: > Magawa retired from bomb sniffing in June 2021 owing to his old age, as is standard for APOPO's HeroRATs.> He spent a number of weeks mentoring 20 newly-recruited rats before ultimately retiring to a life of "snacking on bananas and peanuts".> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MagawaEnd to life worthy of being envied.
monster_group: Stark reminder of how precious and meaningful a life can be - of any creature, no matter how small. We should be nice to all creatures not just humans.
ballooney: I don’t like this site’s obsession with reducing everything to market opportunities, but… it’s extremely well documented that land mines, white truffles, cancer, diabetes, chemical weapons, etc can all be ‘sniffed’ by animals and it’s a mechanism that is almost always ‘better’ (cheaper, quicker, more deployable in the field) than human-engineered solutions. Surely there’s some vebture capital opportunity here for better sensors that would unarguably improve our lot more than AI, at least per dollar invested?
lapetitejort: Sounds like the obsession of reinventing trains and trees. Surely training a rat is cheaper than a portable real-time NMR device, right?
caseyohara: I love that Magawa's wikipedia article is structured just like a human: Early Life, Career, Retirement and Death.A few weeks ago when "Croatia declared free of landmines after 31 years" was posted here (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47189535), I rabbit holed wikipedia about landmine-sniffing animals. It's such a fascinating topic.
the-grump: These are the creatures we kill with poison and carry experiments on.
3eb7988a1663: Those mice have a sculpture as well[0].Nobody likes experimenting on animals, but it is use mice or orphans in third world countries. In silico and computational models are just not a good enough analogue for the human body.[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monument_to_the_laboratory_mou...
cdrnsf: RIP Magawa. Animals are wonderful. My grandmother had seizures for the latter part of her life and her doctors were unable to determine the root cause. A Great Dane mix her and my grandfather rescued was able to sense when one a fit was coming on and would lean on her until she was lying down and safe.
gavmor: How does one rat mentor another?
dtsykunov: My guess, first they send them links to confluence wiki.
thinkingtoilet: Rats are intelligent social mammals. They teach by actions. Imagine training a dog. You have two dogs, one trained and one not. You say "sit" and the trained dog sits and you give it a treat. The non-trained dog will quickly pick up on that.
beAbU: Just missing the "controversies" and "personal life" sections!
the-grump: Well it's good to be honest, and so I commend you on that.So the hierarchy is- our kids- "third-world orphans"- other species
mikkupikku: Rats are incredible animals, and this is a well deserved honor.
sonofhans: Rats are sentient beings. If we have a choice, it’s not ethical to risk their lives to meet our own goals.
tedmiston: RatGPT
thinkingtoilet: I agree. However, you get insane push back the second you start to mention veganism. And yes, that is a luxury and there large parts of the world where that's not an option, but if you're reading this comment you probably could survive without eating meat.
delecti: Yep. Another great example of this is any discussion where datacenter resource usage gets brought up. Mention how much water someone's ChatGPT queries takes and people will generally agree it's a problem. Mention how much water their burger takes and at best you'll get people hemming and hawing about protein or indigenous cultures or their cousin's friend who went vegan and got really sick.
jampekka: Sadly demand for heros may increase in the future. Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Ukraine and Finland withdrew from the Ottawa Treaty banning personnel mines. And probably more countries will follow.
