Rats take over from man's best friend

NY TIMES NEWS SERVICE , GONDOLA, MOZAMBIQUE
Wednesday, May 19, 2004,Page 16

Just about every method of detecting land mines has a drawback. Metal detectors cannot tell a mine from a tenpenny nail. Armored bulldozers work well only on level ground. Mine-sniffing dogs get bored, and if they make mistakes, they get blown up.

The Gambian giant pouched rat has a drawback, too: It has trouble getting down to work on Monday mornings. Other than that, it may be as good a mine detector as man or nature has yet devised.

Just after sunup on one dewy morning, on a football-field-sized patch of earth in the Mozambican countryside, Frank Weetjens and his squad of 16 giant pouched rats are proving it. Outfitted in tiny harnesses and hitched to 10m-long clotheslines, their long tails whipping to and fro, the rats lope up and down the lines, whiskers twitching, noses tasting the air.

http://www.taipeitimes.com/News/feat/archives/2004/05/19/2003156177

A job better suited for the scum of all feces rats, the Republican Party members.

US Bishops regret Bush U-turn on landmines ban (But they didn't refuse communion to anyone over it!)
http://www.cathnews.com/news/403/27.php


Bush Shifts U.S. Stance On Use of Land Mines
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A10711-2004Feb26.html

Bush Administration Retains Landmines, Abandons Treaty
http://www.icbl.org/news/2004/464.php
http://www.icbl.org/
http://www.banminesusa.org/

How can you speak so unkindly of rats?

Really, wouldn't you rather have a family of rats in your house than an equal number of pugs?

:)