Why does a rat need to detect landmines at all, you ask? To answer that, we've got to turn away from diminutive, adorable mammals and look to the hells of human military action.
Back in the 1960s, while the Viet Cong of Ho Chi Minh pushed southward in the neighboring country of Vietnam amid the war, political unrest also stirred in Cambodia, BBC reports. A jungle-based, militant wing of the Communist Party of Kampuchea, Khmer Rouge rose to power when another right-wing group deposed the nation's head of state, Prince Norodom Sihanouk, in 1970. A few years later, in 1975, Khmer Rouge took over the nation's capital Phnom Penh, as well as the country.
Pol Pot, leader of the Khmer Rouge, was inspired by China's ruling party and the possibility of a minimalist lifestyle "untainted" by Buddhism. In a vie to build an agrarian utopia, he arrested, tortured, and executed hundreds of thousands of people perceived as intellectuals, banished more to the countryside, abolished private property, and planted millions of landmines across the country.
An area of Cambodia's western border known as the K5 belt still tops the worldwide list of regions with the highest landmine densities. According to The Conversation, the 1,046-kilometer (650-mile) strip of land is festooned with nearly 2,400 mines per kilometer.
Pol Pot's reign lasted only four years until 1979, but he scarred the soul of Cambodia forever, as outlined in the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum.
