"My sheep hear my voice..."
Apparently so do cattle.
Still, this would change riding fences to debugging transceiver software.Building and maintaining fences for cattle is a time-consuming and costly endeavor. That's why a GPS bovine headset may come in handy.This past year, Dean Anderson and Daniela Rus have designed and tested Ear-a-Round headsets on the USDA's 193,000-acre ranch near Las Cruces, N.M. Each Ear-a-Round is equipped with a GPS receiver, an accelerometer and a magnetometer that respectively track the cow's location, speed and direction.Before an animal roams beyond its pre-programed virtual boundaries, defined by GPS coordinates, the computer sends an auditory cue intended to keep the cow in its paddock. (Anderson's experiments show his cattle respond to his voice.) [More]
I'll bet the ol' Marlboro Man is rotating in his crypt.
In related news, Scottish sheep are shrinking. And a dead pig riot in India.
These days it's hard to get too much livestock news.
1 comment:
I'm a college student interning this summer for a feedlot in Southeast Colorado. Right now we have approximately 62,000 head on feed and trying to fill our pens even more. While I think this new invention would be useful on our cattle back home due to the fact that there are more broken wires on our fences than tight ones, I'm not entirely sure it has a practical use on huge tracts of land or on head counts that go up to the thousands. However, looking for black cattle in the dark is about as futile a task and any on the farm, so this was probably easier than just breeding them to be bright green.
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