The Philip DeFranco Show - MS 5.26 How Giant African Rats Are Sniffing Out Landmines and Saving Lives

Episode Date: May 26, 2019

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Sup you beautiful bastards, hope you're having a fantastic Sunday. Welcome to one of your weekend news videos. Today's episode is supported and sponsored by Postmates and PostDeFranco.com. Use code PhillyD to get $100 in free delivery fee credit. But with that said, my name is Philip DeFranco and today we're going to be talking about something pretty serious. We're going to be talking about landmines and interesting technologies that are being used to eliminate them. And a landmine, of course, is an explosive device usually hidden in the ground that's designed to destroy or disable enemy targets. Some are set off by trip wires, but most explode when there's too much pressure on top of them.

Anything from a tank to an enemy combatant or even just a civilian who just happens to pass over it. According to the International Campaign to Ban Landmines, an estimated 15 to 20,000 people each year are killed or maimed by landmines. And the reason that number is so high, why there are so many people still at risk, is not because there is a war now, but because after a conflict or a war is over, no one removes these landmines. Instead, they stay hidden long after the fighting is over. And so what that means is when people start repopulating those regions, they start building their cities and their homes around these landmines.

This has become a genuinely major problem. And so over the years, countries have come together in an effort to tackle this issue. But sending people out to manually clear landmines has proven to be very high risk, difficult, costly, and slow. But thanks to major advancements,

the ways to locate and remove landmines over the years has vastly improved survival rates. So to dive into this issue, to learn more, to look at some of the techniques being used to eliminate landmines around the world, we had Maria Sosyan from the Rogue Rocket team jump into it. Today, there are an estimated 110 million landmines

still lodged in over 60 countries around the world. The most common types are anti-personnel and anti-tank landmines. As the name suggests, one is meant to injure or kill people and the other is used to destroy or disable armored vehicles. And that's the distinction. When I say landmines, I mean anti-personnel landmines. Modern landmines were first introduced during the American Civil War, but it wasn't until around World War I that they became a major military strategy. At this time, mines were used in a

controlled manner and planted in battlefields. It wasn't until the 1960s that landmines began to be randomly distributed on a massive scale worldwide. Today, an estimated 60 million people live at risk from mines and unexploded bombs, and accident rates in some countries like Pakistan, Nigeria, Syria, and Sudan are on the rise. So over the years, countries have tried to come together to help eliminate them. Which brings us to January 1997. Just a few months before the car crash that would take her life, Princess Diana walked in Angola's minefields and took a stance on this highly controversial topic. By walking onto an active minefield, Diana was able to inspire the final push to ban

landmines worldwide. Months after her trip, 122 countries came together in Ottawa for the Convention on the Prohibition of the Use, Stockpiling, Production and Transfer of Antipersonnel Mines and on their destruction. Don't worry, I won't be saying that again. prohibition of the use, stockpiling, production, and transfer of anti-personal mines and on their destruction. Don't worry, I won't be saying that again. Instead, I'll be referring to it as the Ottawa Treaty. The goal of the treaty was to end deaths caused by landmines and ensure that the world is mine-free. But in 2005, there were still around 7,000 deaths recorded from landmines. However, in the decade that followed, we saw a dramatic decrease in deaths, with less than half recorded in 2013.

So in 2014, the now 162 countries that had committed to the treaty met in Mozambique to renew their commitment to eliminating landmines, setting a deadline for 2024. But despite that commitment, we saw a sharp increase in the number of deaths the following year, coming in at 6,967. And according to a report from the International Campaign to Ban Landmines, it was the highest number of annual casualties since 2006. A year later, that number continued to rise, which brings us to 2017, the year that two of the world's largest landmine clearance NGOs, the Halo Trust and MAG, came together to launch a new campaign. And who better to introduce it than Princess Diana's son himself? Together, they launched Landmine Free 2025, aiming to eliminate the 110 million landmines worldwide

by that year. Why the need for another campaign? Because they didn't think governments would meet their 2024 deadline. My mother campaigned to draw attention to the horrific and indiscriminate impact of landmines. Collectively, we have the knowledge, the skill, and resources to achieve it.

So let's make future generations proud and finish what we started. This campaign is a call to action to work together to do more, faster. Because since the Ottawa Treaty, only 29 countries have been cleared. 63 are still contaminated. So let's take a look at one of the NGOs at the forefront of this campaign. You may have noticed the word Halo on Diana's protective vest in the video we showed earlier. Serving as the world's largest humanitarian mine clearance organization, the Halo Trust was founded in 1988 in Afghanistan in response to the global crisis caused by landmines. There, thousands of civilians were being killed or injured by landmines,

and their presence was preventing the return of tens of thousands of refugees. Since then, Halo has been leading the demining effort, clearing landmines in places like Angola, Georgia, Nagorno-Karabakh, Ukraine, Cambodia, Guatemala, Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Zimbabwe, and elsewhere. So how does demining actually work? It's a process that can be done both manually and mechanically. Mechanical demining uses large machinery to clear a lot of mines at once. The machines range from tanks with large chain flails at the front to set off the mines, to specially designed vehicles that just drive over them.

And in some areas, they're nothing more than simple excavators that take mines out of the ground. So they're most often used in places where demining can be dangerous for workers, places like jungles, thick forests, and under buildings that have collapsed. According to the International Journal of Advanced Robotic Systems, a single mechanical clearance machine can work faster than a thousand deminers over flat fields.

So why aren't they used everywhere despite being extremely fast? Because there's a catch. They can often leave behind a mine or two, meaning the area is still left contaminated. Today, Halo has a fleet of over 150 specialized armored machines that can clear anti-personnel and anti-tank minefields. They're currently conducting research and development in partnership with the U.S. Department of Defense to improve their mechanisms.

Let's move on to the process of manual demining. This is where workers manually detect and clear landmines. Once an area has been marked contaminated, it's checked one square meter at a time using a metal detector or ground-penetrating radar. Once a mine has been detected and identified, it's destroyed. This is typically done by placing another explosive charge directly beside the landmine. Depending on the type of terrain, an individual deminer may clear between 100 to 500 square

feet a day. But as you would imagine, the process of detecting a landmine is slow and meticulous. Over the years, organizations have tried to develop new detection technologies to address safety concerns and speed up the process. In some cases, they've incorporated the use of animals, like honeybees and dogs. Dogs have the incredible ability to detect landmines through sniffing the explosives, not the metal. This makes dogs one of the most versatile and valuable tools for landmine detection.

The NGO MAG, for example, is well known for its mine detection dogs who are trained to sniff out explosives and alert their handlers, making them a valuable part of their mine clearance techniques. But there is one other animal that continues to play a vital role in mine detection. Enter Apopo's herorats.

That's right, rats. These herorats are African giant pouched rats that help find landmines as part of an integrated approach. Since the Apopo project was launched in 1997, the nonprofit and the rats have been instrumental in clearing landmines in areas of the world that have now been declared mine-free, Mozambique being one of them. Andrew McGregor is a humanitarian technologist, founder of the Titiano Project, and co-founder of Umveldt, a robotics research and development organization.

I met up with him at Crash Space in Los Angeles, where he spent years independently developing technology to assist Opopo's hero rats. Here he is explaining what these animals do. Opopo trains the giant African pouch rat to sniff for landmines. The rats work in partnership with humans to clear minefields.

And how this works is the rat is put on a little string and it runs across basically in a lawnmower pattern. So the rat will sense a landmine, it will scratch on it with its forepaws, and then a human will note that. And then later on, a human will come and generally put an explosive on top of the landmine and blow it up. So I'd like to learn a bit more about what happens after the landmine has been located. So you mentioned how they place another explosive device tech on the landmine. Can you please tell me a bit about that? So when the rat has a positive identification that a landmine is present, a human will then go out very carefully and probe around that area.

And if the human finds a landmine, an explosive charge is then placed on top of the landmine. You back up, I think, several hundred yards, and then you blow it up. According to Opopo, a hero rat can search an area the size of a tennis court in 30 minutes. A human deminer with a metal detector can take up to four days. Similar to dogs that are used to sniff for minds, the rats have a highly developed sense of smell and are intelligent. Unlike dogs, they're cheap to train, costing only $7,300 for nine months of training compared

to $25,000. They're also cheap to feed and breed and require less maintenance. Because they're indigenous to Sub-Saharan Africa, they're resistant to most tropical diseases. And the best part? They're too light to set off the landmines, so the risk of injury is extremely low. It takes about 15, 16 pounds of pressure, about eight kilograms to detonate a landmine. And a rat paw won't do that. Similar when dogs find landmines, one paw imprint on the landmine

won't bear all that weight. And while it's true that dogs generally don't set off mines, sometimes it may happen by accident or just because the mines are old. The rats minimize this risk. Andrew spoke to me about Apopo's landmine clearance efforts in Cambodia and Mozambique and the current initiatives and technologies being tested to demine other regions. Although the rats are extremely effective, there are challenges with how they're used.

It can be difficult for their human handlers to constantly watch the rats work. It's also difficult to discern between whether or not the rats are scratching because they found a mine or because they're just grooming themselves. In an effort to address this challenge, Andrew is currently leading an independent research project to create wearable technology that will help handlers determine if the rats actually

found a mine or not. Andrew told me about his collaborative work with his mentor, roboticist Ian Ingram. He had the idea of using a motion sensing technology similar to how a Fitbit can tell if you're walking or jogging. This uses something called an accelerometer. And so by making a little bat pack or a rat pack, if you will, it's possible to determine the rat's behavior based on just one sensor on its back

that senses when it's scratching or whether it's walking or not. So when the rat comes up and it scratches it creates a positive signal like that and this signal doesn't happen when the rat does other motions, right? So it's only the scratching motion. In what ways would this technology be better than manual technology? So in the sense that you have a human being who's following the rat watching for any form of movement to identify that there's a landmine in that location.

Would this technology cut that time in half? Would you no longer need humans in the field, essentially? Would there only be rats and tech in the field? This technology will not eliminate humans from the loop. You need a human to decide things, similar to how you still need a human to oversee an autonomous vehicle. How this would be of direct impact is, one, in the training phase, it can standardize

the length of time that all rats scratch on a landmine. It's good to have a second opinion on, like, did the rat scratch right there? Because staring at rat legs for hours and like human conditions and things like that can be a problem for humans so it's just good to have that certification as a redundant system to where the rat finds the landmines in this line of work accuracy is life or death and having these redundant systems in place can only help ensure that accuracy the prototypes that that Andrew is creating are interesting and can potentially help speed up mine detection,

hopefully helping to meet the 2025 deadline. The good news is that according to Halo and MAG, this goal is still attainable. As stated in a recent report, globally, the Landmine Free 2025 campaign estimates that at least $100 million per year of additional international funding for clearance operations

is required to keep countries on track. That estimate includes Angola, Cambodia, Sri Lanka, and Zimbabwe, four countries currently not on track to complete landmine clearance despite having international support. Something to keep in mind is that not all contaminated countries or states are signatories of the Ottawa Treaty, notably North and South Korea, where landmines are still very prominent. But even in this case, these countries are working towards demining their border

and bringing us closer to a landmine-free world. And now with all of that, we'd of course love to pass the question off to you. What are your thoughts around this whole issue and story? What do you think of the new techniques? Do you think that there is some other tech out there? Do you agree that landmine-free 2025 is a viable goal? Any and all thoughts,

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