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Cambodia unveils statue to honour famous landmine-sniffing rat

bbc.com

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Re: Cambodia unveils statue to honour famous landmine-sniffing rat

#101

Post by aa-jv »

consumer451 wrote: post #100
aa-jv wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe that Europe is currently led by warmongers, and yes, that Finland is currently caught in the throes of war profiteering.

Wow. Do you believe that Russia is currently led my warmongers?

Yes, and I also believe that the Western mindset is stuck in a collective dialectic which disallows honest discussion on the subject, because in fact Europe has a lot to answer for on the topic of war, recently, and there is a lot of profit being made by those very European institutions responsible for collectivizing and propagating war-monger groupthink. Europe does not have altruistic arms dealers - it has war-mongering profiteers who have historical ties to the subject dating back hundreds of years.

Russia is not even the worlds #1 source of war-mongering, by a long shot. (The UK and the USA are, having murdered millions of innocent human beings since 2003 in multiple different theatres - countries and cultures deemed inferior by Western, fundamentalist, racist, ruling elites...)

I am not Russian, and can thus do nothing effective about Russia. I am a subject of the criminal 5-eyes western alliance which has murdered millions of innocent human beings since 2003, however, and I no longer believe in Western moral authority which gives us the imperative to 'do something about their war criminals' without "first taking care of our own war criminals", because we have far, far more heinously evil individuals still running the show with bloodied hands and with massive war crimes and crimes against humanity to answer for - yet we do nothing while bleating about Putin.

Re: Cambodia unveils statue to honour famous landmine-sniffing rat

#102

Post by jacquesm »

aa-jv wrote: post #98
jacquesm wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, there is a bit of a problem. Ukraine has shown the reality of dealing with Russia and unfortunately landmines are back on the menu. Yes, it would be much better if we didn't need to defend from aggressors. But if you tie your own army one hand behind their backs then they will lose for sure. This about war, not Oxford boxing rules, and if one side commits one human rights violation after the other it would be g…

Ukraine also showed the world how to utterly fail at finding diplomatic solutions to ones problems.

In the interest of figuring out whether you are trolling or not, can you please describe which problems these are and what diplomatic solutions you believe exist?

Re: Cambodia unveils statue to honour famous landmine-sniffing rat

#103

Post by BirAdam »

ajb wrote: post #34

One demining expert claims that the rats are actually no good, but the charity persists with them anyway: https://nolandmines.com/APOPO%20rats.html I have no expertise. His arguments sound very plausible though.

I too have no expertise here, but I've known quite a few rodents. So... my amateur take:

I do not think that the area would necessarily need to be cleared of debris first. Rats can get places people would never imagine they could quite easily.

What I did find to be consistent with rodents is the difficulty in getting them to use set search patterns and such. Rodents go where and how rodents go, and I've never found it possible to teach them set routes. They get a whiff and tend to go right at whatever they smelled in contrast to dogs who can be taught to take set routes/patterns.

The "distance from the nose" wouldn't matter. Rodents can often smell stuff that's around a mile away... a few inches of dirt (most landmines are under fewer than 25cm of dirt, anti-tank mines under fewer than 30cm) wouldn't be sufficient to deter them.

Reliably signaling humans depends upon the particular rodent. Rodents have personalities, and they will often make very particular signals to their people in response to particular things. Reliably enough to bet a life on it? Not sure, but I don't think they'd be terrible in that regard.

Re: Cambodia unveils statue to honour famous landmine-sniffing rat

#104

Post by BirAdam »

fwipsy wrote: post #56
thinkingtoilet wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Hot take: people get angry about veganism because they suspect, deep down, that vegans are right and feel guilty about eating meat. (Not taking the moral high ground here - I have put approximately zero effort into reducing meat intake at all.)

Hard disagree. People care about animals because they have faces that trigger their empathy. Plant life is still life. The destruction of plants to feed people is no more moral than the slaughter of an animal. The cutting of a redwood to make a desk is not moral. Many people also lack any kind of principle and make stuff up as they go. They get angry at killing a butterfly, but they don't care at all about killing a wasp. Likewise, people get upset about a pig, but they don't care about carrots. The carrots lack a face, and the wasp lacks pretty wings.

Re: Cambodia unveils statue to honour famous landmine-sniffing rat

#105

Post by aa-jv »

jacquesm wrote: post #102
aa-jv wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ukraine also showed the world how to utterly fail at finding diplomatic solutions to ones problems.

In the interest of figuring out whether you are trolling or not, can you please describe which problems these are and what diplomatic solutions you believe exist?

I'm not trolling - its pretty evident that diplomacy was not effective and that the decision was made to go to war, whatever the cost - because thats what happened.

The diplomatic effort to save over a million men from needless massacre on the battlefield was not considered worthwhile by the ruling elites running Ukraine for the past two decades, in face of the immense profits to be made - by an elite few - in war profits.

In the interest of figuring out whether you profit from war or not, why don't you tell us the extent of your own investment in the military industrial complex which currently profits from propagating the "ma' Russia" trope ..

Re: Cambodia unveils statue to honour famous landmine-sniffing rat

#107

Post by Pay08 »

ImHereToVote wrote: post #106
Pay08 wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

War with Vietnam in the 70s.

So Vietnam put those ordnances there, those bastards.

No, all sides in that war (it kicked off the Cambodian civil war, so there were a lot of sides) used landmines.

Re: Cambodia unveils statue to honour famous landmine-sniffing rat

#108

Post by energy123 »

BirAdam wrote: post #104
fwipsy wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hot take: people get angry about veganism because they suspect, deep down, that vegans are right and feel guilty about eating meat. (Not taking the moral high ground here - I have put approximately zero effort into reducing meat intake at all.)

Hard disagree. People care about animals because they have faces that trigger their empathy. Plant life is still life. The destruction of plants to feed people is no more moral than the slaughter of an animal. The cutting of a redwood to make a desk is not moral. Many people also lack any kind of principle and make stuff up as they go. They get angry at killing a butterfly, but they don't care at all about killing a…

The carrot lacks a brain that can experience pain, fear and depression, that's why nobody cares about carrots.

Re: Cambodia unveils statue to honour famous landmine-sniffing rat

#110

Post by lukan »

ajb wrote: post #34

One demining expert claims that the rats are actually no good, but the charity persists with them anyway: https://nolandmines.com/APOPO%20rats.html I have no expertise. His arguments sound very plausible though.

"1) Rats have short legs and can only be used in a smooth, obstruction free area.

2) Rats cannot be trained to move in a search pattern.

3) Rats have the capacity to detect explosive residue and can apparently be encouraged to do so with food rewards...

4) ...but there is no evidence that rats can respond to explosive residue in a hazardous area reliably.

5) There is no evidence that the method of deployment results in a thorough search of the area.

6) The speed of search sometimes claimed would make thorough search (tiny nose within 10 cms of target) physically impossible.

7) The cost of preparing the area where they are used, then dragging the rat back and forth over it has to be added to training and housing the rats.

8) While a rat may indicate on a hazard, it cannot expose and clear it. The cost of manually excavating and clearing any explosive hazard that the rat signals on must also be added to the total cost of clearance.

9) The ground has to be scalped for them to be dragged across it in a straight line, then safe-lanes for the handlers manually searched and cleared – so the total cost of using the rats includes the cost of an armoured vegetation cutter and a fully equipped demining team to prepare the area in which the rat will search.

10) There is absolutely no evidence that the cost is less than the cost of demining the area using the same assets but without rats.

11) Because the rat cannot be trained to search and indicate in a set way (which a dog can be reliably trained to do) there is no way for a Quality Assurance observer to know whether the rat is paying attention, so no way of knowing whether the rat has done anything of any value at all.

"

Ok, I only skimmed the article, but it sounded a bit forced. And already point 1 in the summary makes me sceptic, because rats can climb pretty well as far as I know. (Otherwise I am no expert, either)

"5. There is no evidence that the method of deployment results in a thorough search of the area."

This would be my main question here.

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