By Anupum Pant
While animals are often tranquillized using tranquillizing darts, there’s no such reliable instrument for humans because of two main reasons:
1. The amount of dose has to be varied after the weight of the creature to be sedated is estimated. If the dose is far too less, there isn’t proper effect and if it is too much the animal would die. There’s no way of estimating the weight and changing the dose quickly enough to deal with humans of various sizes.
2. The tranquillizer has to go through the blood stream for it to take effect. So, it usually takes a couple of seconds to sedate an animal. So, if a dangerous human advances towards a police or military personnel with a dangerous weapon, these several seconds might prove to be dangerous.
Thus military and police use the electroshock weapons like TASERs to deal with dangerous humans. While tranquillisers are fine to sedate animals.