Learning to Love Rats: A Postwar Ecology in a Cambodian Minefield

ABSTRACT This paper follows the implementation of landmine detection rats in Cambodia. Over the course of my ethnographic fieldwork with the team for the landmine detection rat technique training in Cambodia, I saw that the way the human landmine detectors (a.k.a. deminers) learned to love the rats also changed how they also learned to live and work with each other. Deminers themselves were usually former soldiers, many of whom had fought on opposite sides during Cambodia's civil wars. Their labor in the minefield was inherently aspirational, and rats were employed in this future imaginary. They worked with former soldiers who, as Theravada Buddhists, would sometimes use the religious word “metta” for the love they felt for their rats, which they defined as “pity‐love.” Metta is a love, I was told, “that can make a cruel person kind.” This expression had a particular valence for deminers who had to work with former combatants, where the stigma of past violence made it uncomfortable to directly address such former enmities. Loving the rats sublimated the minefield's potential violence into potential pity‐love for and with colleagues, mediating a violent past to work together toward a previously unimaginable future: a postwar ecology.