A heroic rat named Magawa has been working for five years in Cambodia, sniffing out dozens of land mines. He is believed to have saved lives.

Now, the animal is about to embark on a well-deserved retirement.

"Although still in good health, he has reached a retirement age and is clearly starting to slow down," the nonprofit APOPO said Thursday. "It is time."

Magawa is a Tanzanian-born African giant pouched rat who was trained by APOPO to sniff out explosives. With careful training, he and his rat colleagues learn to identify land mines and alert their human handlers, so the mines can be safely removed.

Even among his skilled cohorts working in Cambodia, Magawa is a standout sniffer: In four years he has helped to clear more than 2.4 million square feet of land. In the process, he has found 71 land mines and 38 items of unexploded ordnance. //

Christophe Cox, APOPO's CEO and co-founder, said the organization began exploring new explosive-detection techniques after an analysis found that land mine detection was "the most expensive and tedious part of the problem."

"That's why we came up with the idea of using rats, because rats are fast. They can screen an area of 200 square meters in half an hour – something which would take a manual deminer four days," Cox said at the virtual ceremony. //

Though they have terrible eyesight, the rats are ideal for such work, with their extraordinary sense of smell and their size – they are too light to trigger the mines. When they detect a mine, they lightly scratch atop it, signaling to their handler what they've found.