Indian army deploys urine power for boar-hit golf courses

 

Could damage like this in Australia be avoided by
following the Indian lead?

Vikram Jit Singh, TNN
The Times of India
Jul 29, 2013

CHANDIMANDIR: For the last three weeks, golfers playing the jungle-besieged Shiwalik Golf Club (SGC) have heaved a sigh of relief. There are no greens and fairways dug up on the back-9 holes by marauding wild boars. Little did golfers know that the secret to keeping boars away was a bottle of amber-coloured liquid strung on a stick.
The mystery got resolved when a weekend golfer decided to take a sniff at the liquid in the bottle, which dripped slowly through a pinprick. It turned out to be human urine, or more particularly potent "fauji" urine, that acts as a kind of a urine scarecrow and puts off boars at night by giving them the jitters of human presence in the area.
The SGC management tried every trick to keep off boars, which would rip grasses and force large contingents of greenskeepers to wake up early morning and repair patches before golfers arrived.
The grass would take six months to regenerate. But all methods like standard scarecrows, fencing, crackers, potshots with rifles failed. The main reason why boars resort to extensive digging for tubers and roots at the SGC is that there are no agricultural crops in the Chandimandir cantonment, where they can predate regularly.
Then, as luck would have it, an innovative idea floated in after years of suffering sustained damage. A "peescare"! Boars have an acute sense of smell though their hearing and eyesight are not very good. In the US, hunters use bottled boar urine to lure boars, with the urine of sows in heat proving particularly potent as a hunting decoy. "When the then Western Army Commander, Lt Gen S R Ghosh, was admitted to an Army hospital in Delhi, he came across a newsitem about a farmer from Kerala. That farmer was facing a boar invasion, which destroyed his vegetables. But the farmer noticed that the boars would keep clear of a patch where he would urinate. So, the farmer started to urinate in more patches. The result was that boars started to keep away from vegetables. Knowing the acute problem the SGC faced with boars, Lt Gen Ghosh suggested we should try it out. It took us some time to work out the modalities but when we implemented it, the results were instant," said Lt Col Gurdial Singh (retd), executive secretary, SGC.
A bottle of human urine lasts more than a week at the SGC.
The detail of greenskeepers charged with looking after a particular green are responsible for producing the urine for that scarecrow!
"The greenskeepers are happy as their early morning back-breaking work to repair dug patches has ceased. The back-9 holes have almost been cleared of boar invasions. However, boars have started invading the front-9 holes, which are in the lower part of the course. We had attacks during recent nights on holes no. 1 and 7, and I have directed that these urine scarecrows be put there also," added Lt Col Singh.
This innovative method, which uses minimum investment and produces good results, is not listed in the conventional methods proposed by experts such as Dr N P S Chauhan of the Wildlife Institute of India, Dehradun, to mitigate boar-human conflicts.
Boars are among the most pugnacious of mammals and among the worst of crop predators. They are the most widely distributed of large mammals and succeed in adapting well to human-altered landscapes. Very large boars, who weigh up to 200 kg, are known to be fearless, attacking hunters and not backing off in front of even tigers. 

http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/chandigarh/Army-deploys-urine-power-for-boar-hit-golf-courses/articleshow/21440421.cms?intenttarget=no