Little Pioneer: The excellent rat

Magawa is her name and she is a Giant Gambian Pouched Rat - quite large, as you can see in the picture below. Her job: detecting landmines. She has now been awarded the PDSA Gold Medal.

The working record of Magawa is impressive: she has sniffed out 39 landmines and 28 unexploded ordnance.

The British veterinary charity PDSA has awarded the animal the Gold Medal for "life-saving devotion to duty in locating and clearing deadly landmines in Cambodia." It is estimated that there are up to six million landmines in the Southeast Asian country.

Magawa - born and raised in Tanzania - weighs 1.2 kg and is 70 cm long. While much larger than many other rat species, Magawa is still small and light enough not to trigger mines when traversing over them. The rats are trained to detect a chemical compound in explosives, meaning they ignore scrap metal and can search for mines faster. Once they find an explosive, they scratch at the top to alert their human handlers. Magawa is able to search an area the size of a tennis court in just 20 minutes - according to Apopo, the organization that trains the animals, a person with a metal detector would take between one and four days.

The PDSA Gold Medal is inscribed with the words "For animal bravery or devotion to duty." Among the 30 animal recipients, Magawa is the first rat.

The seven-year-old rodent was trained by the Belgium-based charity organization Apopo, which is based in Tanzania and has been raising the animals - known as HeroRATs - for detecting landmines and tuberculosis since the 1990s. The animals are certified after one year of training.

Receiving this medal is truly an honor for us," said Christophe Cox, CEO of Apopo. "But it is also a great honor for the people in Cambodia and all people around the world who suffer from landmines." We say: Well done, little big rat! HERE is the award ceremony.

Find APOPO on the internet: www.apopo.org

Find PDSA online: www.pdsa.org.uk