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Magawa is believed to be the first rat in the world honored with a public monument.

The statue was commissioned by APOPO, the Belgium-based nonprofit that trains rats to sniff out explosives, and hand-carved from local sandstone by Cambodian artisans. It stands along the Siem Reap riverbank near APOPO’s headquarters and depicts Magawa wearing the operational harness and gold medal he was awarded in life. Its base incorporates fragments of decommissioned explosives.

Magawa’s tally is more impressive than the round-number version that has circulated in international coverage. According to APOPO’sofficial count, reported by Cambodianesshe sniffed out 71 landmines and 38 unexploded ordnances over five years in Cambodia, 109 devices in total. He cleared more than 141,000 square meters of contaminated land, an area the Boston Globe calculated as roughly 26 football fields.

Magawa was born in 2013 at APOPO’s breeding center at Sokoine University of Agriculture in Tanzania, where the organization runs its training program, and was deployed to Siem Reap in 2016. He retired in 2021 and died in 2022 at age eight.

“Magawa was one of the best rats we’ve ever had,” Michael Raine, APOPO’s program manager in Cambodia, told the Boston Globe. “He was calm and focused. He was gentle and friendly with his handlers. He just had the perfect temperament.”

Raine said Magawa could clear a tennis-court-sized area in about 20 minutes, work that would take a human deminer with a metal detector several days. APOPO’s HeroRATs are trained with positive reinforcement to recognize the chemical signature of TNT and to scratch the surface above a buried device when they find one. They are then rewarded with banana or peanuts. The animals get one day off per week and daily play time.

Rats are well suited to the job for two reasons: they are too light to detonate the mines they walk over, and their olfactory acuity rivals that of dogs. The breed APOPO uses, the African giant pouched rat, can live up to eight years in captivity, longer than most domestic rats.

In 2020, Magawa became the first rat to receive the PDSA Gold Medal, the British veterinary charity’s highest honor for animal bravery, sometimes described as the animal equivalent of the George Cross.

The statue unveiling on April 3 was presided over by Ly Thuch, first vice-president of the Cambodian Mine Action and Victim Assistance Authority, who told attendees Magawa’s legacy reflected “a standard of resilience and trust” in the country’s demining mission.

Cambodia is one of the most heavily mine-contaminated countries in the world, the legacy of overlapping conflicts spanning the 1960s through the 1990s. According to APOPO, landmines and unexploded ordnance have killed about 18,800 people and injured 45,000 in Cambodia over the past 47 years. An estimated 6 million mines are still buried in the country. The government has set a target of becoming mine-free by 2030.

Magawa already has a successor. Ronin, one of APOPO’s current detection rats, set a world record in 2025 by uncovering 109 landmines and 15 unexploded items since 2021, the BBC reported.