Lola, Bomb-Sniffing Rat.

Meet Lola, who’s at the top of her class of bomb-sniffing rats being trained to sniff out landmines in Colombia.

The smartest rat among the first six that the government is teaching to locate explosive devices planted by leftist rebels, she has a 90 per cent success rate in locating explosive material in her laboratory training maze.

Police animal trainers, tired of seeing their explosive-sniffing dogs blown up by stepping on mines, hope the white-furred, pink-eyed creature will lead her classmates through upcoming open field tests and then into the Andean country’s live mine fields before the end of the year.

At about 220 grams Lola is too light to detonate landmines that guerillas set to protect crops used to make cocaine, which they sell to fund their four-decade-old revolution. It takes about 400 grams to detonate a mine.

Link (via Nutmeg)