Street dogs graduate in explosives
detection course!
April 16th, 2008 - 11:01
am
ICT by admin - 
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By Sujeet
Kumar
Raipur, April 16 (IANS) They
are alert, know danger when they see it and are certainly not hard to come by.
Street dogs are now being roped in for an explosives detection course in Maoist
violence-hit Chhattisgarh. Four street dogs have just
graduated in a nine-month Improvised Explosive Devices (IED) detection course from the Counter
Terrorism and Jungle Warfare College (CTJWC) in Kanker
district, 140 km from here.
They are soon to be posted
in the hilly, forested southern interiors of the state - a hotbed of Maoist
insurgency though traditionally it’s Alsatians and Labradors that have been used as sniffer dogs.
“I picked up four street
dogs within my college premises and handed them over to 10 trainers to admit
them to the CTJWC in July 2007 for a complete nine-month training
.
They are called Lily, Sally, Teja and Kareena,” B.K. Ponwar, director
of CTJWC, told IANS.
“With the first batch having completed its training April 1, the three dogs
are now fully capable of detecting IEDs up to six
inches below the ground surface,” said Ponwar, a
retired brigadier of the Indian Army
The CTJWC has now picked up two more street dogs and are looking for at
least four to six more healthy puppies to begin the second batch of training.
The first lesson of the course is of course ‘how to be obedient’.
“These trained street dogs can detect explosives up to 20 inches below
the surface if advanced training capsules are offered,” Ponwar
claimed. “I found them tougher, harder, sharper and more active than pedigreed
dogs during the training period.
“This is the first time in India that street
dogs have been enrolled for an IED detection course. I haven’t heard of stray
dogs being trained anywhere else for sniffing out explosives,” Ponwar said.
“Since one sniffer dog costs about Rs.85,000, it’s time the Indian forces looked for mongrels or
street dogs as a perfect alternative to species like Labradors and
Alsatians that are favoured.”
The Chhattisgarh government set up the CTJWC in
August 2005 and roped in Ponwar as director. He was
then heading the Indian Army’s prestigious Counter Insurgency and Jungle Warfare School in Mizoram. Chhattisgarh is one of
the states worst hit by Maoist insurgency.
Ponwar said: “Trained
street dogs can help contain insurgency and
terrorism because the country is short of sniffer
dogs in proportion to their demands and the area of armed conflict and
insurgency is widening by the day.”
Officials at the Chhattisgarh police
headquarters here say that the trained street dogs will soon be posted in
either Bijapur or Dantewada
district, which witnessed a flurry of landmine attacks by guerrillas on police
and civilians facilities.
(Sujeet Kumar can be contacted at sujeet.k@ians.in)
