Oof, only 90% survival rate for deminers.

Drones can help these days

Can drones sniff explosives? I think that would be very expensive, they can have metal detectors, and mark suspicious sites for someone (or something, like a different digging drone) else to check.

But rats can sniff explosives and do so succesfully.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magawa

The flying ones can use thermal cameras. The mines and surrounding areas change temperature differently.

Then the ground ones do the actual demining.

But this only works for mines not or only lightly covered by earth I assume?

There has been lots of rain falling from the sky, moving earth, since the mines were laid.

> He spent a number of weeks mentoring 20 newly-recruited rats

How does that work for a rat? Sounds interesting.

I don't know how it works for rats, but I assume it is like with dogs. If you have already a trained dog, you make the same exercises with the trained and the untrained dog, so the untrained dog can just watch what the trained dog does and imitate it.

That's not how you would typically train a working dog.

I imagine it depends on the work?

I am not an expert here, but am a bit familiar with how rescue dogs are trained and this is a method in use.