Shirin Dhabhar

Both the work dogs are trained by Shirin Dhabhar, a dog trainer and canine behaviourist, and President of India Award winner, whose team bagged the Innovation in Agriculture award from SABIC this week, for the most accurate and cost-effective solution. The Kingdom’s Ministry of Agriculture had already spent a considerable amount in trying to find a solution for the same, including a $10,000 audio device, and another that used thermal imaging. 

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“The audio device would detect the presence too late, while thermal imaging wasn’t accurate enough either,” Dhabhar, a resident of Dadar Parsee Colony tells mid-day over the phone.  This, she adds, is where our dynamic duo came in. “We trained them in Navi Mumbai, working on their breed’s superlative sense of smell. Since the weevil is actually indigenous to India, we introduced the dogs to the pests.  We began by placing the larvae in a tree and rewarding them with the tennis ball for every successful attempt,” Dhabar says.

After a year’s training, Skylar was able to detect the larvae with 100 per cent accuracy at a Saudi date farm. According to Dhabhar and her team’s observations, a single dog can cover up to 200 trees in a day. So, if the initiative gains impetus and 10 dogs are trained to do the same, an average date farm, with approximately 30,000 trees, will see detection of larvae in 2,000 trees per day. “Sometimes,” muses Dhabhar, “the solutions lie in what our ancestors used to do.”