I spent a year or two doing research on electronically herding cows. Dean Anderson at the USDA holds patents on it (which are probably about to expire, or may

I spent a year or two doing research on electronically herding cows. Dean Anderson at the USDA holds patents on it (which are probably about to expire, or may have already). We worked with him some and with CSIRO in Australia who I think also holds patents (maybe Halter has licensed them and collaborates with them?) The main reason there is interest in this technology is that fencing is expensive. Think many kilometers of fencing, the cost adds up, and they have to be maintained as well. Also areas next to water are difficult to keep cows away from and fences don't work as well there and the cows tend to damage the soft land. We tried using only sound to guide the cows, with no Pavlovian conditioning and found it didn't work very well. CSIRO used electric shock and found it worked very well, but also upset the cows. Dean and CSIRO then tried electric shock for Pavlovian conditioning, then switched to just sound for earlier warnings before finally shock was applied and found that the cows would eventually respond to just the sound and got less distressed. It's not perfect though, some cows are strong willed and will ignore sounds and shocks and just keep going. If the rest of the herd moves away, they will tend to rejoin it though. There are some problems with the technology. Temple Grandin visited us and said she didn't like the idea of people actually visiting the cows less. Collar worn sensors can't tell if a cow has a rock in its hoof or detect all diseases. With less human observation the cows may suffer more. I've seen one cow start chewing on another cows collar to help it try to get it off. GPS antenna have to stay facing skyward and can be blocked by trees. Some of the later research switched to ear tags instead of collars because they are less of an impedance and less likely to get damaged by the cows. It's more difficult to get everything you need into an ear tag though. There have been several attempts to start companies based on the technology, all of which failed so far. Halter appears to be the latest. We stopped doing research when a prison company approached us with an interest in putting the collars on prisoners.