British Film-Maker to Make Rat Landmine Sniffers Documentary

[CEOCambodiaNews]

06 May 2019
Film-maker to capture rats clearing landmines in Cambodia
A FILM-MAKER from Henley has travelled to Cambodia to make a documentary about rats who are trained to sniff out landmines.

Beth Staley, 23, is making The HeroRats of Cambodia as the final part of her masters degree in wildlife film-making at the University of the West of England.

She flew to Siem Reap last Thursday with her camera kit and is spending almost three weeks in the country making the 10-minute feature.

The mines have been left over from the Vietnam War when at least 26 million explosive submunitions were dropped on Cambodia.

Her film will focus on the work of charity APOPO, which has trained the giant African pouched rat to detect TNT using their sense of smell. She will spend a week at a rehabilitation centre focusing on the work of a charity that creates and fits prosthetic limbs for patients who have lost them in landmine blasts.

From here Miss Staley, who lives in Bristol but regularly returns home to Cromwell Road to see her father Allan, a photographer, and mother Deborah Kelly, a journalist, will travel to northern Cambodia near the border with Thailand.

She will visit an area known as the “K5 mine belt”, one of the most mined areas of land in the world and where explosives are still being found.

Miss Staley said: “We’re going to be going out on to the minefield with the rats and see them actually clearing the mines out of the ground.

“It’s going to be a bit scary because I’ve never done anything like that before and I’ve had to write a 90-page risk assessment.”

The rats are trained in Tanzania, where APOPO is based, but flown to Cambodia to work. They are only allowed to do so from 6am until 9am each day because they are nocturnal.
https://www.henleystandard.co.uk/news/h ... bodia.html

[Clutch Cargo]

Different film maker I think but good video on APOPO and the landmine clearing rats