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Virtual Fence Could Modernize the Old West
Hugh Pickens writes "For more than a century, ranchers in the West have kept cattle in place with fences of barbed wire, split wood and, more recently, electrified wires. Now, animal science researchers with the Department of Agriculture are working on a system that will allow cowboys to herd their cattle remotely via radio by singing commands and whispering into their ears and tracking movements by satellite and computer. A video of Dean Anderson, a researcher at the USDA's Jornada Experimental Range at Las Cruces, NM., shows how he has built radios that attach to an animal's head that allow a person at the other end to issue a range of commands — gentle singing, sharp commands, or a buzz like a bee or snake — to get the cattle to move where one wants them to. Anderson says it would cost $900 today to put a radio device on one head of cattle, but he says costs will fall and the entire herd wouldn't have to be outfitted, just the 'leaders.' Much of the research has focused on how cattlemen can identify which cattle in their herds are the ones that the others follow."
"working on a system that will allow cowboys to herd their cattle remotely via radio by singing commands and whispering into their ears and tracking movements by satellite and computer"
Looks like they're finally re-adapting that technology once reserved only for our most esteemed government leaders ;)
The animal trials usually come before the human trials -- but I don't know if I'd consider any of our current heads of state still "human" ...
I used to work with cattle on my uncle's farm when I was a kid. They are dumb animals. They do dumb things. Anytime you try to move them, they do all kinds of stupid shit. I've seen them get "trapped" in fencing, in ditches, even in bushes and trees. So, here we have a system, which costs $900 for every cow it's put on (and that "just put it on the leaders" line sounds like wishful thinking to me). If it has some sort of mechanical malfunction or loses signal in some mountain pass, you could lose a lot of cattle. If you move the cattle and some of them get trapped in a ditch/underbursh/etc., you could lose a lot of cattle (since no actual person will be there to see it and help them). And if the cows simply ignore or get confused by the signal you're sending them, you could lose a lot of cattle. And every cow lost is a lot of money lost.
Basically, this seems to me like a very high tech, expensive way to so something that's much more effectively and economically done the old-fashioned way. Ranch-hands are relatively cheap, smart, and effective. And handful of good cowboys can move a surprisingly large herd.
This new system, by contrast, sounds unreliable, dumb, and VERY expensive. When you're talking huge herds, $900 a head is a LOT of money. Even $900 a "leader" is a LOT of money. Certainly, its tracking function would be useful to keep an eye on the herd (but I think they already have those sorts of systems already). But the idea that you can move cattle remotely with the push of a button, with no actual cowboys on hand, seems to me like the dream of someone who has never actually worked with the smelly, stupid things.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
So what happens when a posse of rustlers comes along with a roll of tin foil?
UTF-8: There and Back Again
"For more than a century, politicians in the West have kept sheeple in place with fences of barbed wire, split wood and, more recently, American Idol. Now Sheeple researchers with the Department of Homeland Security, are working on a system that will allow politicans to herd their sheeple remotely via radio by singing commands and whispering into their ears and tracking movements by satellite and computer. A video of Richard Dean Anderson, a researcher at [Secret Base], shows how he has built radios that attach to a sheeple's head (called bluetooth headsets) that allow a person at the other end to issue a range of commands -- gentle singing, sharp commands, or a buzz like a bee or snake -- to get the sheeple to move where one wants them to. Anderson says it would cost $900 today to put a radio device on one person, but he says costs will fall and the entire population wouldn't have to be outfitted, just the "troublemakers." Much of the research has focused on how DHS can identify which sheeple in their herds are the ones that the others follow."
I'm upping my tin foil.
We need something like this for our congresscritters so we can whisper commands into their ears..you know, like "Don't vote for the bailout".
Just hack in and send them where you want. Yippie Ki Yay...
I've noticed that my representative needs the occasional cooing in his ear to stop him from throwing a fit and puking all over himself.
All these Bluetooth wearing peoples existence becomes clear...they were the prototype for Cattle management. Truly the work has flipped upside down. I would love to see Rattlesnake, Bee, growling pumped into those things while people cruised around.
... except ... for cattle.
I call dibbs on the patent that interfaces to the cows to allow internet operation.
Keep movin', movin', movin',
Though they're disapprovin',
Keep them doggies movin' Rawhide!
Move 'em on, head 'em up,
Head 'em up, move 'em out,
Move 'em on, head 'em out Rawhide!
Take the cheese to sickbay, the doctor should see it as soon as possible - B'Elanna Torres, "Learning Curve"
...the plan assumes that the "leaders" are statically chosen by the heard.
It might negatively impact "that's the cow I want to follow around!" feelings when your leader starts hearing voices in it's head and jumping at snakes that aren't there.
to see a flash-mob of cows on your lawn anytime soon...
If Pandora's box is destined to be opened, *I* want to be the one to open it.
I got a laugh from "Much of the research has focused on how cattlemen can identify which cattle in their herds are the ones that the others follow." I have also worked around cows in the family beef operation, and all one has to do to identify the "leaders" is watch the cows.
Why, without your clothes, you're naked, Miss Dudley!
So they're inventing a time machine to travel back to the Old West? Wouldn't it be easier just to try this in the modern West?
How much bovine stupidity can be attributed to human preferences? Have we bred cattle to make them more stupid? I'm sure wild bison and buffaloes are a lot sharper. I expect it's our fault; when did you last send back a steak in a restaurant because it wasn't intelligent enough?
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
Imagine a big, pissed-off herd taking Bombay or any other city in India. Who would dare to stop them?
Granted, the current generation of the technology is primarily analog, and is phenomenally expensive to operate. And, regrettably, the notion that mass-producing them would REDUCE cost has proven wildly inaccurate. But we've got top people on it, and I'm sure we'll work all the kinks out soon.
I wanna play World of Warcow.
Genesis 1:32 And God typed
from observing the modern American political process
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Moooo! ... bzzzzzz ... MOOOOOO!
- Please, come back to the stable!
Moooo!
- OK, you force me to use brute force!
Moooo
- I told you!
Maybe Computers will never be as intelligent as Humans.
For sure they won't ever become so stupid. [VR-1988]
I can see it now, herds of High on Mushroom teenagers running around the fields with the gear on their heads.
Wouldnt you ?
This is JUST BEGGING for a New Beavis and Butthead episode......
Wow, I just visited that ARS site back in May (for an IT conference)... btw I work for USDA-ARS (the people doing this work); just at a different location (not in NM).
Oh and for the record, make sure the bus drivers don't do 90mph in the desert (actually on the Jornada Test Range) and break any oil pans this time!
I can imagine inside each cow's head: "We get signal. Main screen turn on."
How long till they start doing this to us? In the name of preventing terrorism of course...
Republicans!
.
Cattle will follow the lead cow who takes them where they want to go. Therein is the flaw to the plan. If the identified leader follows the commands of the cowboys and goes where the other cattle do not want to go, will the other cattle then continue to follow that leader?
Your in luck, there is in fact a World of Warcow level hidden in Diablo 2.
I only look human.
My mother is a halfling and my dad is an ogre, so that makes me an Ogreling
to be able to say, "Hold on, I'm getting a call on my cow phone!"
The cowboy controllers can be outsourced to India.
"The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old......They literally know nothing." - Ben Rhodes
Ten-cent RFID ear tags make sense.
Training cattle to respond to a multitude of radio commands is laughable.
But they can learn at least one useful trick. If you honk your horn every time you bring fresh hay, they learn that sound means "food."
So we already have a cow tractor beam.
The pressor beam is your dog.
I've got to wonder, has our litigious society made field trips impossible? So much "research" is done by people who have never been outside.
If these kind of things work and get widely accepted, farmers will eventually lose their traditional how-to.
My worry is about what will happen the day the network goes down. In th event of a local or global catastrophy , networks and electricity grid may just be some of the first services to go.
That may lead to a scary situation where not even the milenium old skills like agrigulture and animal husbandry are commonly known.
Singing? I can see it now: iTunes for cows! Or worse,
""Are you losing cows due to dropped calls to your bovine herd? Download your cattle's favorite ringtones from the Mozy Network! Mozy: Less deadspots than the other cattle network!"
...conducive to well functioning electronic equipment.
Anyone else smell (other than the cows) a technical maintenance nightmare?
Although if you can get them going in a conga line or spell out words, it might be worth it. Make a good halftime show.
before we see farm-hand out-sourcing to India.
This reminds me of how they controlled the martian soldiers in the Sirens of Titan. Soon, maybe we'll be controlled by ice cream truck noises, buzzing bee sounds, and kitty-in-distress samples. It's really just easier to not eat meat.
Laugh now, but when your iTunes music store has a "cattle herding tunes" section on it, where you can download rattlesnake sounds and cowboy whispers, it'll be a goldmine with the farming community!
McGuyver made a machine that can control cattle out of 3 gum wrappers a DIVX player and a old WebTV box?
oh thats RICHARD Dean Anderson?
nevermind then.
Now we'll have *sshole cattle walking around with bluetooth headsets talking loudly to themselves and annoying the rest of the herd. Of course, on the upside, now when I see some suit wandering into Starbucks I'll be able to imagine him heading soon to the slaughterhouse.
Just think of the impact to the tenderness of the meat: them cows 'll be lookin' left 'n right all day, all stressed-out, trying to figure out where them bees or snakes' be hiding at!
They could be engineered to want to be eaten.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
I work with cattle for a living, both my own and helping neighbors. I see it over and over. There are definitely leaders in a herd but there are also cattle that will not follow unless you get behind them and get them moving in the right direction. Maybe there's a slow one who stepped in a hole yesterday. Maybe the calf has picked that moment to get a snack and the mother stops for it to suck. Or it's the nervous cow that heads for the hills at the first sign of a roundup. Hell, there's even leader cows who decide to go different directions. Cattle like routine and if they don't usually go a certain direction they don't really feel like going there. Many times I've had a herd approach an open gate and stop. After a few minutes of trying to get them to go through they scatter. But often the first place they head when I start trying to round them up is where they go to drink water because it's what they do every day.
Shit, at $900, just give them cell phones on a collar, FFS. Staple some blue tooth earpieces onto their ears and you're golden. I doubt the receivers they're using are any less likely to give them brain cancer.
Wonder how long it will take until we progress from cowbot to Lobot.
... Isn't that a guy who buys and sells stolen property in Second Life?
Most if not all ranchers would prefer to get out and about and not live indoors. That is one of the attractions of the lifestyle. Sure, knowing where your cattle -are- would be a good thing, but you are going to want to check on them, and the water tanks, and salt blocks, and their health in person.
2 killed, 14 injured in Baghdad after a suicide bovine attack. Feargus Urquhart has denied involveme
They are bred for docility and for large and fast weight gain and huge milk production. Docility is number one though, you can't do squat with a really wild cow (total range cows excluded, they are all mostly wild) I have an eastern perspective on this, and a small herd that are traditional barbed wire fenced in. I have one now, pretty wild and suspicious, takes me forever to lure it into the barn/corral in order to deal with it, like de worming, etc.. The rest, tame enough, come when they are called-literally, I just yell at them to come on in. I make a point every new calf to go up to them and rub them a lot and get them to smell me and be around me for the first week, momma willing of course, most put up with it because we get along OK, and it works, they get and stay at least half tame-to me anyway, not to anyone else around here. Dairy cows I have worked with, about as tame as puppies, most of them anyway, because they are handled daily and want to be milked, they line up for it. As to smarts a big variable there, I've seen some pretty sharp ones then some walking vegetables, the majority are in between. Lot of folks around the world still use oxen for working, singly or in teams, they tame up and are smart enough to be reliable enough for that sort of thing. I was going to do that myself, but haven't had a good set of bull twins yet.
...there go the rest of our IPv4 addresses! I can just imagine it: the Java Cow Interface library v0.1. Let the cowboys control their cattle via laptops in the field. myCow = moo.create(). "Warning: cow at address 64.04.207.2 refuses to enter pasture!"
If your only tool is a hammer, every problem becomes a nail.
Why bother with that, when there's a cow level in WoW too. It's called Mulgore ;)
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
How about a GPS-enabled shock collar? Or maybe a GPS- and flux gate magnetometer-enabled ear shocker that'll not only know when they've strayed out of bounds but will know which ear to zap to get them pointed in the right direction!
Tiller's Rule: Never use a word in written form that you've only heard and never read. You will end up looking foolish.
I'm surprised these things are $900 - compare them with the "invisible fence" dog collars, which are about $100/receiver (plus the wiring in the ground, which is the more expensive par.) These may be a bit fancier, and while you want the batteries to last longer, you can put much heavier batteries on a cow than a dog.
It sounds to me like what they're really able to do is make open-range grazing more possible - the West was mostly unfenced until farmers started winning out and forcing ranchers to keep their cows fenced in. (That didn't mean there weren't corrals or whatever.) If this kind of technology works out, not only does it mean that farmers will have alternatives to maintaining fences, but also that wild animals will have less fencing to deal with, which will help them do whatever migration they need to.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
I always wondered why the President had the football near him at all times.
They ARE out to get you simply because They are in it for themselves and they don't care about you.
A few months ago there was an article in the NYTimes about the decline in various African cattle breeds as they're getting replaced by Holsteins and other First-World agribusiness cattle. The African cows were big-horned ornery creatures that are adapted for their environments; the Holsteins are weaker, more disease-prone, don't get along as well on the local vegetation - but produce about 10 times as much milk, which means that a small farmer can produce enough surplus income to send his kids to school, so the old breeds are getting replaced, in spite of the extra costs for things like medication. There are essentially no wild cattle these days; they've been domesticated for a long time, so if farmers stop using a given breed, it's pretty much lost to the gene pool.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
So funny, a friend and I were bouncing emails back and forth over the use of small GPS chips after seeing an article on GPS enabled pet collars. The Desire to Profit was in mind... we envisioned a cool web site with all sorts of interesting images of cattle being manipulated by cool technology,etc. Anyway, my joke/rant from 2003:
The Digital Ranch(tm)
"Wireless Ranch(tm)"... (Web site and hardware in development, pricing to be announced)
So, you have your herd of cattle, bison, horses, sheep, whatever- you implant one "Ranchhand(tm)" chip in each, and then you can monitor all your ranch assets via your computer. Each chip monitors all of the animals vital statistics, as well as it's location, and reports them to you via wireless networking. So you can pull up a real-time display of your herd at any time, pick out individual animals and check on their health, see where they've been, set watch points on health and be notified if anything goes out of bounds. Of course, all this ties into "Ranch Database(tm)" that you use to track the health and progress of each animal through it's life cycle.
Each animal can also be fitted with the optional "Drover(tm)" module, which provides audible signals to the animal (backed up with a mild to severe electric shock) to modify the animals behavior. As the animal approaches the perimeter of the area you have defined as available to it, it receives a pleasant "chirp" warning it not to proceed, followed by a mild shock if it doesn't comply. Fences and the cost of their maintenance become a thing of the past! When it's time to move the herd to another pasture, to the barn, etc., the "Wireless Ranch" software module will send the appropriate signals to gather your assets together and herd them to where they need to be. Individual animals can be separated and directed as needed for grooming, health maintenance, harvesting, etc.
Feeding chores become more efficient with the "Smart-Trough(tm)". Using the "Drover(tm)" module, animals can be guided to specific feeding receptacles, so supplements and medications can be automatically dispensed to specific animals. Using the optional pressure mat at each feeding trough allows you to automatically weigh each animal. With the "Ranch Vet(tm)" health monitoring software the need for supplements and medications can be automatically assessed and dispensed!
Docile healthy animals, with less effort than ever before- the "Wireless Ranch(tm)" is your ticket to a more efficient and profitable ranch than ever before!
I've spent some time around cowboys while they were working. I respect what they do. They have a very difficult and demanding job. However, they didn't seem the kind of people who were well paid. The rancher, yes, but not the cowpuncher. What is the anual cost of a cowboy, his materials, and transportation (not just the horse, but the trucks and other gear they need).
I'd love to see maddox write a follow up to his article on the segway in regards to this "new method of herding.
Barbed wire is working fine. It uses abundant resources, and does not require a special chemical composition to continue doing its job. (i've run into century old barbed wire in forests which have since been designated protected wilderness)
We don't need poltergeist machines to whisper things in cow's ears.
We CERTAINLY don't want to make the simple control of livestock dependent on a 100% uptime on an electronic device.
Finally, we don't need to be consuming even more electricity when we're having numerous national campaigns, even by right-wing officials, trying to solve the nation-wide energy crisis.
VLC FOR MAC IS DYING! IF YOU DEVELOP, PLEASE SAVE IT!!
So.....a DDOS attack would be, maybe, commands given to guide said herd of cattle onto the nearby stretch of Interstate 5 in the middle of the night?
Humans don't seem to mind in the same situation.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
The difference is one was dealing with paint (inanimate substance) one is dealing with cows (dumb animals), anything dealing with inanimate objects is relatively easy and cheap to automate, anything dealing with animate objects (or irregular objects) is difficult and expensive to automate
Wasn't it not that long ago that we had a article here about automated milking machines, and no longer having to get up early in the morning to milk the herd?
I don't read AC A human right
I am a third generation farmer, worked with cattle for 25 years. I'm now an IT guy, but that's a different story.
Different cattle situations vary. In the US West, cattle live on vast expanses of thousands and thousands of acres. This land is pretty crappy, takes lots of acres to provide grass for a herd. These cattle are routinely moved over longer distances. This is the traditional cowboy scenario. While pickup trucks and 4-wheelers are a godsend, there are still places where a man and a horse will always rule. A good horse knows how to work cattle almost as well as a man.
Dairy cattle are different. They have smaller pastures (perhaps supplemented with hay), and are used to going into the barn every night. When they are lactating, a full udder is uncomfortable. While their little pea brains won't directly associate the milking machines with "oh, what a relief it is", they are ultimate creatures of habit. When it's suppertime, they are ready to go. Handling dairy cattle already is very sophisticated. RFID tags can keep a lifelong an daily history. As they stick their heads in to eat, the feeding program can note recent health issues, and custom mix this meal's feed to be exactly what is best for this cow now.
Beef cattle (what I did) are different yet. I did it in the USA Midwest. We would breed cows/heifers, feed their calves out, and sell the calves. Beef cattle that are pastured get moved around from one pasture to the other, to give the grass a chance to grow back. There are no long cattle drives like the West. Others do confinement feeding, where the cattle stay a lot more enclosed. This introduces more problems with manure management, health, etc.
Like everyone here with experience has noted, cattle are inherently dumb. "Wild" cattle/bison may be more aggressive with predators, but that is a survival tactic that is learnable.
There are leaders, but an essential part of moving cattle is "driving" them, getting behind them and keeping stragglers going. One dumbass cow can start veering off for some/any reason, and half of them can peel off and follow, just because that's what they do. A good stock dog can be worth it's weight in gold, and sometimes is.
For big cattle drives in the West where they are going for days? I could see robocow being a help. Cattle do learn words (or, more accurately phoneme combinations) and tone. You will always need humans to move them.
Get off my lawn, whippersnapper!
I only look human.
My mother is a halfling and my dad is an ogre, so that makes me an Ogreling
As a fellow former farm labourer I completely agree with you. This is a waste of time and money and a few cowboys can do the job better and cheaper.
This quote from the summary says it all:
Much of the research has focused on how cattlemen can identify which cattle in their herds are the ones that the others follow.
I imagine this line of research was a failure because cows don't follow any leader for any good reason. They see one cow moving and think, "she move, I move too" and that's about it.
You can't lead cows. Unless you have blackstrap molasses in your pockets. Then you'd better run like hell.
a bunch of bull to me.
> radios that attach to an animal's head that allow a person at the other end...
hmm, where's this person supposed to be, say again?
I don't think the Indians will go for this. The last time we played Cowboys and Indians....
Down With Slashdot BETA!!! I've been around the corner and seen the oliphant; you can only abuse me from your perspecti
... after the radio control that this other ranch head has implanted? This 'leader' of the free world?
Just find the ones that face north first:
http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/08/26/1514226
http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO2&Sect2=HITOFF&p=1&u=%2Fnetahtml%2FPTO%2Fsearch-bool.html&r=6&f=G&l=50&co1=AND&d=PTXT&s1=trimble.ASNM.&s2=manning.INNM.&OS=AN/trimble+AND+IN/manning&RS=AN/trimble+AND+IN/manning
Engineering is the art of compromise.
Both of my grandfathers raised beef cattle and my father still does. Normally my father (and his father before him) would drive into a pasture where they wanted to gather the cattle, honk the horn for a few minutes and then lay a line of feed. The cattle come to the sound of a horn where they're counted as they line up and eat. This makes it easy to tell if any have been left behind by the herd (injured or strayed) or have left the herd to give birth. I've seen much the same thing from my other grandfather, but there was a long stretch of time when his pickup horn didn't work and he would literally call them in with his voice.
These days my parents don't enjoy the rough lifestyle as much as they did when I was growing up. In those days we would gather the herds with horses, herding them into the pen. These days, they feed the cattle in the corrals a few times over weeks leading up to times when we need to pen them, and on the days when we need them penned, they close the gate after all the cattle trot into the pens.
The price tag on this bit of equipment sounds pretty high, but consider that you can get a phone now that has more processing power than most government computers twenty years ago for about $100 (or $20 used.) Lets say that that price: $100, is our regularly adoptable technology rate, and assume prices are adjusted to today's values. Consider that these should have a lifetime of about five years, which takes the price to $20/yr. Then assume that you put one of these on every fifth cow, which takes the average price down to $4/yr/cow.
I suspect this tech is more geek motivated than rancher motivated and over complex due to it. A very simplistic device will have one low tone and a varying pitch between two others, plus a built in compass and tracking utility. You program your hand held master to send pulses rising in tone as the cattle turn toward the desired location, increasing in beep frequency as they move toward the goal and switching to a low hum when they reach the desired point.
With the device described, you program in a location near the herd the first couple times and feed them there. After a while, you feed further away so that they get used to following the audible cues. The stop signal comes into play so that you can gather several smaller groups together by having them wait at a location before continuing to the final goal. The rancher will need a couple months to get the herd trained the first time, then just a few reminders throughout the season to keep the training established. Since most ranchers feed regularly anyway, this would not be an undue cost or difficulty. After five years or so, you would have a well trained herd of cattle at a cost of $5/cow annually (factoring in a mild service and battery upkeep fee.) I think that most ranchers would go for that cost, and many would get by with far fewer than one in five cattle needing the tracking device.
B) Eliminate all the stupid users. This is frowned upon by society.
"Git along, little [*static*]"
for my wife that goes off within 500 yards of a shopping mall?
Well, I'm glad the research money is going to good use. I doubt anyone will blink at attaching a $900 piece of hardware to a $700 cow. Since this will replace a fence that requires very very very little maintenance with a system that requires constant attention and talking to cattle.
This has to be the most retarded invention I've ever heard of. What brought about the demand for this device? People who want to be cowboys but don't like the whole cattle/outdoors/cowboy part of things?
I'm sure the several people he hires to replace the batteries will completely mitigate the need for people familiar with herding and handling cattle...wait...no it won't.
I mean WTF?! Really?
There is no cow level