“Rats are also more reliable,” said Alfredo Adamo, a field supervisor here. “With humans, concentration wanes after a while, but rats just sniff away.”

The rats are paid in bananas, peanuts, avocados and apples, and they don’t need body armor — partly because they’re too light to set off land mines. (They can still weigh up to 2.5 pounds, which is a lot of rat when you’re face to face.)

I think I found my rat: a scraggly codger named Boban who is just the right age to have been trained when my kids sponsored the rat. Boban was named after a Tanzanian soccer star, and the handlers said he was highly dependable.

Bart Weetjens, a Belgian product designer, started the HeroRat program after puzzling about how to improve mine detection. As a boy, Weetjens had kept rats as pets, and he came across an article about the use of gerbils for tasks involving scent detection.

Weetjens then consulted rodent scholars, who suggested Gambian pouched rats, in part because they compensate for very weak eyes with a superb sense of smell. They are called “pouched” not because they are marsupials but because they fill their cheeks with nuts and other goodies, and then bury them underground — relying upon scent to recover their caches later. Another advantage of Gambian pouched rats is that they have an eight-year life span that offers a lengthy return on the nine months of training needed to detect land mines.

So Weetjens started an aid group, Apopo, that trains the rats in Tanzania and then deploys them to minefields in various countries. Apopo is also now branching off into using HeroRats to detect tuberculosis — a disease of poverty that kills 1.5 million people a year around the world.