To the public

To Whom it may concern,

          Don’t you enjoy a nice lazy sunny afternoon just walking down the streets past your local park with smiling children running around? It must be nice to know that you can relax and enjoy your day carefree with no worries in the world, I know I do. However not everybody can enjoy the same feeling of security as we all do here back here where it’s safe and sound to roam the streets. In Asia, Africa, and Europe there are countries and villages that can’t take a step down the road without thinking twice. Why? Because they have a chance that may end their life right then or there, or worse blow off an arm or two and become scarred with trauma.

                Not much people can enjoy a peaceful day knowing that they are living in a hazardous area filled with landmines, and what’s more scary is that it’s been years since these mines have been planted, and even after more years there are countless of them still existing. What’s more frightening is that nobody knows exactly how many there are. There are no such large machinery that have been thought of that can detect and DE active these mines at a large scale, and the dirty work is being done in teams to remove just one mine out of hundreds. However with time comes progress and results, and that concludes in results.

                When fear of a plague or disease outbreak happens everybody gets frighten and afraid of catching that virus. The concept is similar to the problem with these landmines; with years of fear with a disease, a cure is eventually found or even a vaccine to prevent the problem. With years of fear of stepping on a random landmine so have the evolution to fight against this problem and a whole new resourceful way of detecting these bombs are created. Rats are the cure in this analogy. A man named Bart Weejins have trained and trialed with rats to have them sniff off mines in the dirt. He used the basic training method of using a clicker and treats to have them search holes for five seconds (Which are long for rats) and then trained them to detect the smell of metal out of ten holes. The final product is in the field using rats on leashes on the actual mine fields to sniff off landmines.

                This is extraordinary. I thought the future for mankind would be in the hands of technology that is why I had high hopes that technology would be the next step to the fight for finding mines. But to my knowledge it is the use of biology. Although the progress of clearance of landmine is showing some results, it was without the use of technology. So in this case, technology isn’t always the answer for an efficient method.