Kochi: The lonesome picture of a dog desperately seeking its young master and her family had tugged at the hearts of Keralites for days following a massive landslide at Pettimudy in Idukki district earlier this month.
While India’s National Disaster Response Force (NDRF) members kept up their efforts to reclaim bodies of 70 tea estate workers whose row-house quarters had been smashed and buried under the onrushing waters and earth, the dog too stayed put.
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Only later was the dog’s identity revealed: The two-year-old female canine was the pet of Dhanushka, a two-year-old girl who died in the landslide. It was Dhanushka’s grandmother Karuppayi who identified the dog as Kuvi, Dhanushka’s playmate.
Dhanushka died in the landslide along with her parents Pratheesh and Kasthoori, and her elder sister Priyadarshini.
While NDRF members carried out the search for bodies with the help of trained sniffer dogs, Kuvi too hung around using her own sniffing skills to trace her beloved Dhanushka and her kin.
Fittingly, it was Kuvi who finally located Dhanushka’s body, tangled in tree branches lying in the waters in the Gravel Banks area near the tea estate.
Touched by the loyalty of the dog and her mournful lookout for the family, and a huge fan following for the dog on social media, the state police have moved her from the disaster site to its dog squad campus in Idukki.
“The move is primarily based on compassionate grounds. Technically, we recruit into the dog squad only canines that are up to two months old. Kuvi is nearly two years old. What we are doing now is giving it shelter and taking care of it”, Roy Thomas, sub-inspector of police in Idukki in charge of the dog squad told Gulf News.
State police chief Loknath Behera had also taken an interest in Kuvi’s well-being after news of the dog caught headlines.
Thomas said the Idukki district police’s dog squad has three sniffer dogs to help sniff out narcotics and explosives, and two tracker dogs that are used in crime investigation and similar needs.
Kuvi may not be a trained sniffer or a tracker, but it proved its skills in both these areas by sniffing and tracking out Dhanushka’s body eight days after the landslide. It may never be formally inducted into the police dog squad, but Kuvi will surely carry some additional lessons to the police dogs in loyalty and compassion.
