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South Africa Drones For Anti-Rhino-Poaching Patrol
garymortimer writes "The SA National Defence Force is considering using an unmanned drone helicopter to target rhino poachers, Defence Minister Lindiwe Sisulu said yesterday. She told a press conference in Pretoria she wanted state weapons company Denel to further develop an unmanned aerial vehicle it was working on so it could be used to help SA National Parks catch rhino poachers."
How long until the poachers use drones to hunt the rhino?
Stick a tranquilizer gun in it to knock out the poachers from a distance so that they can be picked up. If they try shooting back, use a sniper rifle on them.
"..One hosts to look them up, one DNS to find them, and in the darkness BIND them."
Pb Paintballs FTW!
The cost of that cleanup, of course, will be borne by taxpayers, not industry.
When a species is this near the edge something drastic needs to be done. If they were hunting the rhino for food I'd have some sympathy , but just to make money selling the horn to halfwit chinese for their idiotic herbal "remedies" or aphrodisiacs is inexcusable. And don't anyone respond with some western moral imperialism argument - we're beyond that niave political nonsense now. If poaching isn't stopped the rhino will soon be gone.
I'm a descendant of those boers. Trust me - it's not like that anymore.
Very much like the average person living in Lincoln County today cannot draw, fire and actually hit a target in under 4 seconds anymore. It was a survival skill for my ancestors a hundred years ago, that skill was why roughly 500 men could defeat a conservatively estimated 10000 men at the battle of blood river (granted there were several other force multipliers that they used - their enemies had short-range spears [Assegai is really a sort of intermediary design between a spear and a sword] rather than guns, they had an excellent location that prevented all the enemy forces from striking at once, the weather was hugely in their favor), some 70 years after that their grandchildren gave Britain hell in a war for 3 years that was ultimately only won by ultimately killing 27 thousand women and children.
After the war though, the vast majority of their children moved to cities and towns, the great shooting skill of my ancestors died out within two generations.
My great-grandfather could hit a thumbprint at 500m through open-sights in real-world conditions (so could just about everybody he knew of course), my grandfather could just about hit a beer can at that range, my dad will probably hit somewhere in target (but he is an ex-cop).
Most of the generation of us today have fathers who still go hunting now and then - but the vast majority of us have never actually fired a gun. I don't own one, and feel no need to - and I am actually a good shot. My sister and I both won colors doing sport-shooting in school. She was the rifle expert, I preferred pistols.
Neither of us have ever shot a weapon at any living thing however, neither of us have fired a gun in at least 10 years, we've never done so without supervision. As adults, once we no longer did the sport - our interest waned. And most of our schoolmates didn't do the same sport, many of them own pistols but most of them have never even touched a rifle.
We're still a gun-crazy country (almost as bad as America really) - in part because of that history and the fact that our parents were still draughted in the bush-war - but the fact is, the old Boers who could live off the land for weeks at a time, never-ever missed a shot (because bullets were expensive and scarce), and could hit a moving the size of a rabit from a horse in gallop just don't exist anymore. Our field-rangers in the parks are probably the closest to that which still survives - and it's clearly not enough or we wouldn't be looking at this sort of technology. Those of us who still farm are the last ones you should look at, they are by-and-large the most obese population group in the country.
Sadly, your documentary sounds fairly accurate - but it's about as applicable to modern-day industrialized Afrikaans culture as a documentary on Billie the Kid is to the typical modern American.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
Finally, a decent use for drones. Instead of killing people, they save rhinos.
"I agree that poaching endangered species is a terrible crime, but death penalty seems excessive unless you also want to apply it to the subhumans who jack deer up in Wisconsin."
the difference being while deer may be scarce where you are, they are nowhere close to endangered and in some places are right up there with rats as an overpopulated nuisance. You want more deer? Ship them in. You want more rhinos? Ship them...wait a sec...
not standing up for deer jackers, just pointing out that killing 1 of 30 million deer (source wikipedia) is a less serious matter than killing 1 of 4000 rhinos (source world wildlife fund). Do people go to SA for anything besides safari type vacations? Lose a few more species and watch tourism decline to the detriment of the entire country. Still not sure if it should be a capital offense, but it's serious.
Ya stuff like a thumb print at 500 meters is just insane and impossible.
A modern standard military sniper rifle is around 1 minute of angle(MOA) accuracy. So roughly, at 500 yards (close enough to meters), groups will be shot within a 5 inch circle. The chance of you hitting a thumb print is fairly small.
Even the best guns from a machine rest shoot 0.25ish MOA, so this is a 1.25 inch circle area at 500 yards. Keeping in mind this is a scoped modern rifle, with a modern bullet, in a clamp on a bench.
The ballistics and metallurgy of the time obviously would not even allow for a fraction of this accuracy, never mind actually holding the gun while taking a shot. And the above post mentioned Muskets, which obviously would be hard pressed to hit something the size of a human at 500 yards, nevermind a thumb print.
It's easier to fight for one's principles than to live up to them.