DERA BASSI/PUNJAB: For the first time in the country, dogs are being trained to detect epilepsy and cancer. A band of white German shepherds, which were brought from Canada around eight months ago, are also being trained for room intervention to sniff out terrorists or anti-social elements hiding or holed up in a building, as well as check for or detect leaks in oil and gas pipelines.
The dogs are being trained at the Punjab Home Guards Canine Training Centre at Dera Bassi, near Chandigarh. Speaking to this correspondent, Newton Sidhu, director, Punjab Home Guards Canine Training Centre, said, “We imported four white German shepherds from Vancouver, Canada last August. They are being trained to detect epilepsy and cancer and perform a range of security-related tasks. They are being trained by Kuldeep Singh, formerly an officer with the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP), at our facility.”
“As part of the training, the dogs would be taught to detect if a person is about to have an epileptic attack. They will be trained to detect certain chemical reactions or imbalances in the human body which bear hint of an epileptic attack. This way, they would be able to alert a patient’s family two or three minutes before he comes down with an epileptic attack, thereby allowing timely medical intervention and medication to control of the severity of the epileptic seizure,” Sidhu told this newspaper.
“Similar trainings are also being imparted to dogs in USA, Canada, Italy and France. The training period is usually of 10-month duration. It’s a rigorous session, as the canines are trained for 2 to 3 hours every day with pseudo scents of the chemical reactions in the human brain before an epileptic seizure. While the trained dogs are sold for $25,000 each abroad, we intend to put a price tag of $8,000 each on them as the training cost here is comparatively less,” said the director of the training facility.
Quizzed how the dogs are being trained to detect cancer, he said, “They are being taught to smell human faeces and detect if a person has a cancer cell in his body. This kind of detection is already common in countries such as US, Canada, UK and Australia. Since this is the first such training programme in India, we are in talks with some leading cancer institutes to make use of these canines.”
On the training for security-related tasks, he said, “They could also be used by our special forces. For this task, a camera would be mounted on a dog and it would be given instructions through a wireless headphone, so that it could detect terrorists holed up in a building.”
Fishing out terrorists
Detecting Cancer
The dogs are being trained to sniff human faeces and detect if a person has a cancer cell in his body.
Early detection will go a long way in stemming cancer-related deaths in the country.