REAL LIFE NEWS: ROBOTS VS CATS
by Hazed
Cats and robots are two of my favourite thing. (You only need to add chocolate to make it perfect.) So what happens when you pit them against each other?
Well, YouTube may be full of videos of cats riding around on Roomba robot vacuum cleaners, but this story is about using robots to eradicate wild cats in the Australian outback.
The robots detect a cat, then spray its fur with poison. Cats being fastidious creatures, they will lick the poison off and die. Sounds horrible, but feral cats are a big problem in Australia, threatening many of the country’s endangered species. Controlling their numbers has proved extremely hard.
So now an ecologist has come up with this new “grooming trap”. John Read took seven years to invent and test it, and the first trap was recently switched on in a nature reserve in south-west Queensland.
“Cats are hard-wired to hunt,” Read said. They can kill dozens of animals a night, but it’s hard to trap them with traditional bait because they prefer to kill an animal themselves. So the trap exploits their tendency to lick off anything that gets on their fur.
The trap has four laser rangefinders that detect when something moves in front of it, and gauge its size and height depending on which sensor gets triggered. If it’s too big or not the right shape to be a cat, the trap shuts down. Only if the creature fits the parameters will the trap spray poison.
Another safeguard against killing the wrong animals is that cats are far more likely to lick the poison off than any other species.
The traps attract cats by playing recordings of animals that felines might prey on, such as rats or cats in distress.
The trap is now being trialled in three locations and if it proves successful it could be deployed at a wide range of sites.
