The men in olive green have at last discovered an unorthodox way to keep their greens intact. It’s pee.
A bottle of urine has worked wonders against the aggressive boar invasion on the Army’s lush green golf courses in Chandimandir, the military cantonment area adjoining French architect Le Corbusier-designed Chandigarh.
When scarecrows and everything else failed to deter the unexpected incursions, the ingenious “scarepee” did the trick, and that too with utmost precision. All the Army did was erect a stick in the golf greens that held a tawny bottle of urine perpendicularly strung to it. Boars have phenomenal sense of smell, and that was exactly what the military men intended to utilise.
The smell of human urine was enough to scare the boars away at night, when they usually make their intrusions. For boars, the smell of the human urine was an indication of human presence, which drove them away.
Until weeks ago, the Army had tried everything at hand—from gunshots to crackers to fencing—to check the invasion of wild boars, who would surreptitiously foray into the golf courses in the dark of the night and rip apart the greens and fairways. Dug-up green patches the next morning would deter the golfers.
Lt Col Gurdial Singh (retd), executive secretary of the Shivalik Golf Course (SGC), said the back-nine holes have almost been cleared of boar invasion after the human urine bottles were experimented with. They replenish the bottles with their urine.
So how did it all begin? One of the former Army commanders of Western Command, Lt Gen S R Ghosh, thought it prudent to try the urine experiment after he read a story about a farmer in Kerala who use to pee in his fields to drive away wild boars.
For the Army, it was mission accomplished.