जासूसी कुत्ते और उनकी गाथा ; कुछ सुझाव भी।
इस लेख में मेरे एक मित्र विशाल ने जासूसी कुत्तों के बारे में और उनके द्वारा किये जाने वाले कामों को उजागर तो किया ही है। इसके साथ ही साथ उन्होंने इसका एक विकल्प देने की कोशिश की है / यदि किसी कंपनी या इंस्टिट्यूट को इसके बारे में अधिक जानकारी चाहिए तो वह डॉ. विशाल से सीधे संपर्क कर सकते हैं। The full credit of this article goes to Dr. Vishal and his supervisor; team.
उनका जीमेल यूजर ID है: vishalkumar डॉट bij
अस्वीकृति: स्मरण रहे यह एक अकादमिक लेख है। बिना किसी जानकार के मार्गदर्शन के बगैर यह नुक्सान दायक हो सकता है , इस ब्लॉग या लेखक की कोई जिम्मेदारी नहीं होगी.
Can we put bomb-sniffing dogs out of misery?
Abstract:
The article
explores why trained sniffer dogs still outperform advanced detectors in
identifying explosives, highlighting their extraordinary olfactory
anatomy and intensive training. It also reveals the ethical concerns
about the serious psychological strain, health issues, and eventual
misery faced by service dogs. To address these issues, the researcher
focuses on developing a multimodal explosive sensor as an alternative to
safeguard security while reducing dependence on sniffer dogs. Early
laboratory results using a novel fluorescent copolymer demonstrate high
sensitivity toward conventional nitro-explosives, indicating strong
potential for a low-cost, high-performance detection technology.
Main article:
It was early 2016, when I secured pre-Ph.D. registration at Indian Institute of Technology Roorkee, a temple of learning in the foothill of Himalayas situated in Uttarakhand. I was going through some literature to excel in my research career as a chemical physicist. It was then, two of the research projects in the field of chemical sensing caught my eye. One project entitled "TIRAMISU – Toolbox Implementation for Removal of Anti-personal Mines, Submunitions and UXO" was a flagship project of European Union countries from Jan 2012 to Dec 2015 (Overall budget € 19,767,368,68) to develop a new sensing strategy towards detecting explosives with a goal to clean civilian areas from landmines and cluster munitions. The other project was a notable $ 19,000,000,000 research project of American research and development agency named Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). This project was known as "Dog's Nose" and aimed to develop a next-generation portable explosive trace detector. Surprisingly, both projects landed up with the same conclusive statement that "Trained dogs are still best at detecting explosives".
Now, the main question is, despite spending billions of dollars, why do lab-made explosive detectors still can't beat a dog's capability? Why do we still rely on trained dogs for airports, border security, combat terrorism, bomb detection, and disposal? The second question is, what is so magical about sniffer dog’s nose and their capabilities that we can't mimic regardless of having such technological advancements in the field of explosive trace detection.
At that moment, I had lots of curiousness in my mind. I was very anxious to know the reasons behind this mysterious capability of dogs. So, I started gathering facts to answer my inquisitive questions. And, the answers came after understanding the basics of anatomy and physiological study of dogs' olfaction. Dog's nose is amazingly complicated and extends from the nostrils to the back of its throat, providing 40 times larger olfactory area than a human's. And during sniffing, the inhaled air in the dog's nostrils separates into two distinct pathways, Olfactory and Respiratory (Figure 1). About 13% of each breath follows the upper path and flows through 220 million olfactory receptors (nerve cells) straight to the olfactory reason, where odour molecules are accumulated and prevented from exhaling. These 220 million numbers may not seem very large considering the 37 trillion human full-body cells. However, compared to mere 5 million olfactory receptors human's nose, it becomes evident to sense the smell at concentrations down to parts per trillion which can be described as sniffing out one drop of liquid in an Olympic-size swimming pool.
Additionally, dogs also inhale up to 300 times per minute in a short breath and constantly
supply their olfactory receptor with fresh odour particulates. Moreover, dogs also have the
ability to smell independently from each nostril. All these unparalleled and incredible senses
of breathing and scenting are jumbled together to empower dogs to sniff continuously over
many breathing cycles and locate precisely from where a specific odour is coming.
But I was still curious to know, is it sufficient inborn characteristics for any dog to serve
anytime-anywhere with its exquisite sense of smell to hunt, search and detect explosives?
The obvious answer is NO.
But why this big NO??
I asked myself and started flicking through a puppy's life journey to become a country's frontline
security defense wall.
Though dogs are very smart with an eidetic memory and sniffing skills but still, a juvenile
dog (puppy) needs to undergo rigorous six to eight months of training before induction into
any security wing or dog squad. There are many training centers for dogs across India, such as
CISF Dog Breeding Training Centre in Ghaziabad, Army's Remount and Veterinary Corps (RVC) in Meerut, where specific breeds of dogs like German Shepherds, Labradors, and Swiss Mountain dogs are preferred for training because of their natural ability to adapt any schedule and atmospheric conditions.
For a very long-time, these sniffer dogs have been familiar faces to us at Metro stations, transit centers and airport security checks to screen out the unidentified bags or possible improvised explosive devices (IEDs). They are trained to perform various tasks for civilian and military safety, such as sniffing out hidden explosives, chemical warfare agents, and illegal drugs. They can also sniff out persons who have recently handled explosives and secure our homeland from a number of possible threats.
But this utmost security comes with a huge training cost of dogs along with their handlers. Throughout the training, dogs are trained to sniff out types of explosives, such as RDX, TNT, PETN, picric acid (TNP), ammonium nitrate, dynamite, nitroglycerin, nitrocellulose, plastic explosive C4, Semtex, black powder, potassium chlorate and many more. These suspicious explosives' odors are imprinted on dogs' brains and build their own vocabulary index by constant repetitive exercises. They are also educated on military-specific hand gestures and even verbal orders by their handlers. On hunting explosives or suspected articles, dogs are also trained to pass silent clues to their handler in order to avoid alerting any nearby suspects.
Since then, I find it deeply concerning that how an adorable-loveable creature, a puppy dog that we come across every day, devotes its life to national combat service support and keeps us safe from unknown threats.
Apropos of this enlightening information, a question raised in my mind: when we have trained sniffer dogs as the best natural explosive detector for neutralizing and deterring threats to public safety, then why are we putting so much effort into developing a device to detect the same hidden explosives and unexploded bombs?
Later, I realized the sad reality that these military dogs experience post-traumatic stress disorder during their service. And the prolonged exposure to explosives poses a negative health impact on psychophysical activity and circadian rhythm. The repetitive training process to advance an astute sniffer dog makes these health conditions more severe.
It almost broke my heart when I comprehended how we are indifferent about the physical and mental conditions of sniffer dogs, their traumatic experiences in service life and how they are put down after 8-10 years of social welfare. In most cases, retired sniffer dogs are euthanized just to protect classified information on sensitive locations that they may have. This is inhuman and unethical to employ dogs as tools to combat terrorism. They are also living creatures and deserve fun-loving lives like other animals.
After all, if we can replace a pilot with a computer, we should really think to build an explosive sensor to outperform dogs and put them out of their misery.
Discussions with my supervisor:
With this motivation, I took this problem as a challenge and discussed it with my supervisor to pave the way for explosive sensor project. He was very excited to hear this back-story and backed me as he had some prior research experience in explosive sensing. He apprised me about the first commercialized field-tested explosive trace detector, called FIDO, developed at Massachusetts Institute of Technology Cambridge, under a pivotal American project knows as "Dog's Nose". This device is based on a proprietary technique called Amplifying Fluorescent Polymer (AFP). The working principle of AFP is, the fluorescent property of sensitive polymers diminishes as soon as it adheres to any particulate floated away from unstable explosive materials. He explained the detailed chemistry and the working principle of this device by pointing out an Achilles heel that this FIDO device has. It was only focused on sensitive and selective detection of nitro-explosives such as DNT and TNT. And, it also had false alarms to innocuous and analogous chemical compounds. So, he motivated and guided me to address these flaws in improving the sensitivity and selectivity of the AFP technique and develop a low-cost multimodal explosive sensor that can efficiently detect a wide range of explosives.
Conclusions:
And this way, my Ph.D. research journey started with a goal to develop a multimodal explosive chemical sensor that mimics the dog's ability to detect explosives. A highly green fluorescent dansyl-tagged copolymer, named DCP, was synthesized. This copolymer functioned on the same AFP technique and exhibited high sensitivity and selectivity towards conventional nitro-explosives. The rate of fluorescence quenching of as-synthesized copolymer DCP was used as an alarm signal for explosive detection. We performed advanced optical studies to probe this sensing mechanism, and I can say that till now, the results have been promising at laboratory scale. There is still a long way to go to develop an Indigenous explosive trace detector where Chemistry meets Physics through Electronics. It is exciting to continue working on this problem, take it to the next level, and develop an economical explosive trace detector better than FIDO. This detector will not only strengthen our homeland security but also provide a better and stress-free life to sniffer dogs.xplosive sensor that can efficiently detect a wide range of explosives.
The following two papers can be used as references for fluorescent Dansyl-tagged copolymer named DCP.
https://pubs.acs.org/doi/full/10.1021/acsapm.1c00
Contact: vishalkumar dot bij at gmail dot com
