There's No Slipping When They Go Sniffing
by Vinay Pais
He is by far, the most loved and looked-after universal pet. In India, as per mythology, he had accompanied Lord Dharamaraja to heaven. In China, he can tickle the taste buds of the connoisseurs of food. In the lay outs of the Silicon City of India, Bangalore, he is the notorious kid-killer and in the slums of Mumbai, he is the ubiquitous king but in this corrupt world, he is the least corrupt and the most efficient policeman to have ever set his foot on this earth.
Who is he? He is no less a person than the police dog, capable of sniffing out explosives like bombs, giving out clues in cases of robbery, theft and murder. He can not be bribed nor can he be involved in scandals. His job is not to catch the culprits red-handed but only to facilitate the searches offenders by giving out vital clues. Whether a threat is real or a hoax can decisively be zeroed in by his selfless service, sometimes at the cost of his own life. The kind nature has endowed him with air scent, material scent and ground scent in the formidable task of investigation. He is aided by the extraordinary faculties of smell, sound, sight, touch and tongue.
His daily meal consists of one egg, 500 ml of milk, ten grams of shark oil, 200 grams of rava/braley/sabakki/noodle. Evening meal contains 200 grams of rice, a kg of mutton plus green vegetables. His food is sans salt, sour, sweet and spice, as salt leads to skin irritation, spice causes allergy, sour boils and sweet causes worms.
How is he trained? Pups are at first, selected by the superintendent of police and veterinary doctor. A four-month pup is normally trained for 11 months. Habits such as giving company, sitting, standing, keeping quiet, walking parallel, taking rest, fetching things, searching and sniffing, barking, door opening, sleeping, rolling, crawling, attending to calls, hand-shaking, saluting, jumping, running, catching, watching, refusing etc are taught. After the training period, police dogs need to remain bachelors for life.
Efforts bear fruits, provided the trained dogs make to the place within two hours of the incident. Clues are normally found only after a hard search, if the incident is reported after a delay of over four hours. Thereafter, the inordinate delay is not worth complaining. As anti-social activities normally occur at nights alone, it becomes difficult for the policemen to get hold of the predators. The miscreants escape, after giving a slip to the police. So the police dog is never at fault.
The department of police in Udupi district has trained three dogs called Seema, Brutus and Blacky. They belong to a breed known as Labrador Retriever. As Seema is pretty old (10), she is not normally pressed into service, whereas the other two, namely Blacky (4) and Brutus (4) are adept at investigating explosions of any kind and criminal acts of robbery and theft respectively.