"Though they have terrible eyesight, the rats are ideal for such work, with their extraordinary sense of smell and their light weight – they are too light to trigger the mines."

"When they detect a mine, they lightly scratch atop it, signaling to their handler what they've found. Their reward: a banana."

From "Hero Rat Wins A Top Animal Award For Sniffing Out Land Mines" (NPR). Elsewhere, I've seen it written that this rat "won a medal," and, indeed, the president of the U.K. charity that honored the animal said "This is the very first time in our 77-year history of honoring animals that we will have presented a medal to a rat." They call it a medal, so that makes it a medal.

It's a very useful rat, obviously, but it's not choosing benefit us people (or even other rats). It's simply doing what reliably produces a banana. It has no idea of the danger of a land mine, and there doesn't seem to be any danger for the lightweight creature, certainly nothing that the rat knows about, so there is no courage involved other than what courage it takes to hang around human beings for the sake of banana.

Show me a rat that has displayed heroism. This isn't that rat. But the medal is for us humans, to feel pleased with the contribution of a rat. The rat doesn't care about a medal. It cares about a banana.