Ronin the Rat

...a rodent scholar who saves lives

This week I was cooking with the Duchess of Sussex. Well, actually I wasn’t cooking and neither was she. She was looking like she was cooking while navigating her rebrand from recovering royal to domestic goddess. And I was just reading about it.

As some of you may remember, I learned to read at age 56. Or rather, relearned to read after losing basic and essential skills when I was hit by a, oh, never mind. Let’s just say, after losing basic skills.

Reading is, of course, essential and this week it helped me learn all kinds of things. For example, one celebrity is preparing for Spring by spending “more time with her wrinkles” while also raking in bucks on her anti-wrinkle brand.

Wrinkles bring us to both Botox and tariffs. Turns out the world supply of Botox — yes, all the Botox in the world — is produced in one tiny Irish town. That price is about to go up — way up — as tariffs hit Ireland, and then, of course, hit us.

Speaking of rats, I mean, speaking of tariffs, a bomb-detecting rat named Ronin has smashed the previous world record for rats sniffing munitions. Since his deployment in 2021, he has sniffed out scores of landmines and other unexploded remnants of war. This is according to the Belgian nonprofit called Apopo, which trains life-saving rats.

Note: This post, although it deploys humor, is not meant to be funny. Saving lives is not at all funny and neither are weapons devices that kill and maim.

Since Apopo began 25 years ago, it has cleared 169,713 explosives worldwide. It is also training rats to detect malaria and to find people in buildings collapsed by earthquakes and bombs. Btw, while a rat can check an allotted area in about 30 minutes, a human with a metal detector might take four days to clear the same land.

As a result of his “exceptional accomplishments,” Ronin recently earned the Guinness World Records title of “most landmines detected by a rat.”

Sadly, the U.S. is no longer interested in saving lives or preventing disease or treating it. That’s why we’re killing things like the Department of Education and libraries and public broadcasting and massive health programs for adults and children here and abroad with direction from the Musk-Rat in charge.

Fyi, because of their small size, the rats are not heavy enough to detonate the mines. They are not killed or maimed. Also, when they reach a certain age, they are moved to a rat retirement community run by Apopo.

https://apopo.org/?utm_campaign=S-Brand-Exact&utm_medium=cpc&utm_source=google&utm_content=561744149751&utm_term=rat%20landmine%20detection&gad_source=1&gclid=Cj0KCQjwqcO_BhDaARIsACz62vOALXqdd60EgKplypeka6wGMlRusfG0q3Am6--075IONY_ReFzwREoaAnZ8EALw_wcB