Squirrel Video: With a Little Help From My Friends

For day one of Squirrel Awareness Month, I want to share one of my favorite squirrel videos. It's about a big squirrel, a young squirrel, and some human friends on the campus of UCLA. Enjoy!

A Soldier and His Squirrel

From the Huffington Post, here is a super-sweet story of a Belarussian army soldier, Pyotr Pankratau, and the baby squirrel that he rescued. The baby Eurasian red squirrel was near death when some of Pyotr's fellow soldiers brought it to him, and the soldier nursed him back to health. Now, two years later, out of the army and driving a cab, Pyotr and Minsk the squirrel are inseparable. While Pyotr is at work driving his cab, Minsk stays with him, sometimes sleeping in a little bed on the dash--and I have never seen a squirrel sleep on its back like that!

Bant Singh and the Persistent Squirrel

Bant Singh is one of those heroes who we never hear much about in the west. A member of the lower "untouchable" caste in the Punjab region of India, he is a protest singer and tireless campaigner for the rights of poor agricultural laborers who are abused and exploited by wealthy landowners. In 2000, he dared to pursue the prosecution of a group of powerful upper-caste men who had raped his daughter. In 2006 he was assaulted by a group of men while walking home from a protest meeting, beaten with rods and axes, and left for dead. Even after he was found, barely alive, and taken to a local hospital, treatment was delayed by corrupt hospital staff, and he lost both of his arms and one leg due to gangrene. Despite his horrific injuries, Bant Singh continues to sing protest songs and to campaign for the rights of Indian agricultural laborers.

Bant Singh

So what does this have to do with squirrels?
Recently, a reporter for the Hindustan Times visited Bant Singh at his home in the village of Jhabhar. As they were sitting in the courtyard of the home, Singh pointed out to the reporter a squirrel trying to carry a red piece of cloth into the upper branches of a tree. Singh, who is a leading member of a leftist political party, revealed that the red cloth was a party flag. "I have been watching this squirrel for a couple of months," he said. "It got hold of the flag that was lying here and it has been trying since then to take it up the tree. Since the flag is heavy, it falls down but the squirrel does not lose heart. It takes the flag once again and starts taking it up."

The connection is obvious. Bant Singh and that little squirrel are both doggedly pursuing seemingly impossible goals: To bring justice to lower-caste Indian workers; to carry a heavy flag up to a treetop nest. Neither will give up, and I hope both are rewarded with success.

Hero Rats!

Once again, it's time to recognize Beebz' rodent cousins the rats.

APOPO (Anti-Persoonsmijnen Ontmijnende ProductOntwikkeling, Dutch for Anti-Personnel Landmines Detection Product Development) is a non-profit organization that does something extraordinary: they train giant African pouch rats to detect land mines. In many parts of the world, particularly in areas of Africa and Asia, land mines have been left behind in the wake of armed conflicts and pose a serious danger to people living in those areas. Finding the mines and clearing them is difficult, time-consuming, and dangerous work--one mistake can cost the clearer his or her life or, at the very least, can result in the loss of a limb.

Don't worry, I'm here to help!

This is where the rats come in. The giant African pocket rat is a large, intelligent, and easily-trained rodent. The rats are trained to move along a line stretched between two handlers and, when it detects the smell of explosives, to scratch at the spot. Using this method, the rats are able to cover a field much more quickly than humans using minesweepers would be able to, and with much less danger of triggering any mines.

It should be emphasized that because of the rats' light weight, there is no danger of them triggering the mines--during the more than a decade since the program was started not a single rat has been killed or injured. Besides their light weight, rats have several other advantages for this work:

• They are sociable, intelligent, and easy to train.
• They have an excellent sense of smell.
• They can identify mines to be cleared more quickly than human workers using minesweepers.
• They offer a low-tech and inexpensive solution to a serious problem that afflicts many areas with few resources.
• The African pouch rats have a long life span.

But clearing mines isn't all that these rats do. APOPO has also begun training rats to detect tuberculosis, a serious pulmonary disease that afflicts many impoverished areas. A single rat can screen forty sputum samples for TB in less than seven minutes, a job that would take a trained technician an entire day. The use of rats for TB detection is still in the development phase, but the initial results suggest that the rats have greater accuracy finding positive samples than the use of microscopy.

APOPO's training and breeding facility is in Tanzania. So far, the organization has done valuable work clearing land mines from areas in Mozambique and Thailand.

For anyone who is concerned about the treatment of rats used for what sounds like a dangerous task, a quick review of the FAQ page at APOPO's website should ease your mind. It only makes sense that animals being employed for important and sensitive work would be treated very well.

Squirrel Nation is proud to salute the brave Hero Rats of APOPO!