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How Virtual Fences Will Transform Rural America

• dmckeon 14y ago
  "GPS-equipped free-range cows that can be nudged back within virtual bounds by ear-mounted stimulus-delivery devices" The developer is working in the northern Chihuahuan desert, where the bearing capacity of livestock rangeland can be expressed in acres per animal (or cow/calf unit), and where a transition from fixed fences to virtual could be a huge revolution for ranchers, landowners, and public lands agencies alike. I'd also be interested to see this sort of tech applied to a more suburban context: a cluster of homeowners at a woodland interface could keep a small herd of GPS-equipped goats to suppress brush and unwanted grasses, reducing wildfire risks and competing with browsing deer, while being less likely to leap out in front of motor vehicles (assuming either good virtual boundaries or traditional fences for the goats between browse and roads).
• mnl 14y ago
  If the future means turning cows into Pavlovian meat robots without remorse, then count me out.