In 2020, a veterinary charity in the United Kingdom awarded a gold medal for the lifesaving detection of land mines. The winner? A 7-year-old rat named Magawa.

Specifically, Magawa is an African giant pouched rat weighing in at 2.5 pounds and measuring 28 inches from nose to tail tip. While that’s big compared to a street rat, it’s still light enough not to trigger a mine.

Magawa is one of the HeroRATS raised and trained by Apopo, a charity in Tanzania. There, rats learn to detect chemicals in explosives and then  alert their handlers.

Magawa can search a tennis court-sized area in 20 minutes compared to the 1 to 4 days it would take a person with a metal detector. In his career, Magawa found 39 landmines and 28 unexploded munitions in Cambodia, where millions of landmines remain from the country’s civil war decades ago.

A hero rat, indeed.