France’s military is training eagles to attack drones | Hacker News Reader

France’s military is training eagles to attack drones

washingtonpost.com

209 pointspetethomas144 comments

This is a copy-paste from what I posted on reddit in regards to the same kind of thing.

Really this entire concept is stupid. Not only are higher-end quadcopters unimaginably acrobatic, to the point where a skilled pilot could easily outfly a bird, but these things are literally flying lawnmowers. Go on /r/Multicopter or any other multirotor forum, there are loads of people that have been sliced all over their arms, and if you dig further, cuts down to the bone in some cases. Given the brittle, hollow nature of bird bones, well. (maybe eagle/falcon legs are different tho?) Seriously, if I was a falconer I would never consent to this. As for people suggesting they use cords or something to tangle the props up, that's really not an impossible problem either, people have been putting mesh cages over their props to fly them safely indoors for some time now, plus if you only stop one prop the quad becomes extremely violent in it's movements, pitching and rolling all over the damn place, which again, will probably at the very least hurt the bird quite a lot. Plus, if you were using quads for nefarious purposes, if that bird catches your quad you're not gonna give up and call it a day, more likely you'll push the throttle to max, which again, will cause that bird quite a lot of harm. If I were the aforementioned falconer, I would make sure the pilot cut the motors immediately before the eagle caught it, as that's the only way this would ever be safe for anyone involved.

Predatory birds attack by dive-bombing. You won't see it coming even if you have an extra camera on the drome pointed upward. They also know how to dive out of the sun which means that they are invisible in the camera view. And their bones are irrelevant because the damage is done by their mass plus acceleration. Likely they are going to be flying with some kind of netting material that will tangle the blades as well.

And birds, even trained ones, might be considered expendable.

Not to mention that using birds does not mean that they will attack the drones. They might just find the drone and point out its position for a ground based missile or laser.

And people fighting against terrorist whose goal is to kill and maim people might be willing to sacrifice a few trained birds to stop the terrorist acts from succeeding.

Missile? Laser? That's insane. As someone who's worked on UAVs quite a bit, the only thing I'd consider taking them out with - in a situation which necessitated it, like a terrorist attack - is guns. Laser systems would be completely unrealistic for this situation, and using missiles would be absolutely overkill.

A predatory bird dive bombing a drone would also not be something I'd bet on. Sure, I have confidence they could evade traditional cameras. But once they hit the UAV, what happens? The bird would almost certainly be killed or maimed by the propellers, and the drone would fly fine. If the creators of the drone spent just $100 extra or so on decent propellers, the drone would easily survive the attack.

Using birds with no extra weapons against drones would only work in case of extremely stupid drone creators, and would probably result in at least one seriously injured or killed bird per drone.

An eagle like in this case is orders of magnitude more powerful than the kind of drone being talked about, though. Not armed military drones, obviously, but these are not the target.

A mass of 4 kilograms or so diving at several hundred km/h will do a lot of damage, keep in mind these birds kill adult deers. They're also used to avoiding the dangerous parts of the animals they attack and fast bird vision gives them a better view of rotors than the indistinct blur humans see. At 10000 rpm or so, birds of prey should actually be able to follow the movement of blades.

They also have more lifting power than most drones, which means they are absolutely able to wrestle them to the ground if the initial impact doesn't knock them off (especially since they will have a far better understanding of what's going on than the drone's operator).

I am as tempted as anyone to think that I am smarter than professionals I read about in the news, but I'm pretty sure these guys have thought their experiment through.

Ehh. Orders of magnitude, plural? Several hundred km/h? That's a stretch. These are golden eagles, my favorite kind of bird. Their diving speed is around 220-250 km/hr, and their horizontal speed is around 40 km/hr. They will speed up horizontally to catch prey, but this is typically only up to about 90 km/hr.

I've seen UAVs kill birds before though, and it's always a horrifying scene, reminiscent of the plucky character in a dystopian sci-fi movie meeting the all-powerful violent crusher of doom. Moderately powerful UAVs can easily resist birds. Even an off the shelf DJI Phantom 4 can - with stock everything - go 72 km/hr horizontally. I'd bet the eagle could catch up to it, however: the problem comes when the bird meets drone.

Every bird-drone incident I've seen is usually an instant kill (or comes close) for the drone, simply because most of the surface area of the drone is covered by four spinning propellers. The tips of these blades are going several hundred miles per hour, and the area of the top not covered by blades is only a few square centimeters covered in smooth, hard to grip plastic. Now you're telling me that a huge bird (that has a wingspan longer than most humans are tall) can grab onto this tiny place without becoming mincemeat? If the blades are carbon fiber, there's a good chance they won't break upon cutting the bird in half.

I've worked with drones enough to know what will and won't stop them. A bird won't: it'll brush the blades and fall to the ground in a bloody mess. A bullet will. Bullets are tried and true technology, we know how to use them, they're not ridiculously expensive, and they will certainly take down any drone of reasonable size.

This is PR, plain and simple. There's no other explanation for it, unless France's air force is hilariously incompetent, which I would doubt.

Here's a bird vs a slow cruising drone. The attack style seems decent enough to avoid the rotors depending on size.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hr-xBtVU4lg

this is a hobbyist drone, not a militarized one.

you can see that the blades got damaged because they're cheap plastic, perfectly fine if you just want to shoot some videos from an aerial pov. if you want to use your drone offensively you'd use a) a swarm of drones, b) a significantly stronger one or c) a swarm of hardened drones.

as the parent mentioned: the rotors become brutal weapons if you make them from carbon fiber or cheaper but still durable material

At that point why build a drone, a missile is cheaper. The terrorist > drone link is all about off the shelf components.

Military drones like the predator weigh more than a car, and we have plenty of weapons built for that. Small off the shelf drones are not something you can really hit with a missile, but you can shoot them down fairly easily with a gun. However, you don't really want to fire up into the air in the middle of a domestic city, making birds a more interesting option.

PS: They don't need to disable the drone, simply adding 8lb of weight will take most of them down easily.

You can build a great payload carbon fiber blade octocopter for $2000 or so and a few Youtube tutorials. Cheap carbon fiber blades can be $2 each! I wouldn't recommend using them if you care about safety, but on a single-flight mission they're perfectly fine. If you can get a missile (!) inside of metropolitan Paris for $2000 I would be very doubtful (as well as very concerned.)

There's also no way that a golden eagle can fly away with the drone: it'll definitely be taking it down too. A golden eagle has a payload of 900 grams. [0] Nine hundred grams! Videos of birds (typically not golden eagles) 'carrying' dogs or even goats for a half-second or so are because they perform a special swooping maneuver with their wings that lets them lift things up, taking advantage of the ground effect. There is no way this would work with a UAV, unless it was moving extremely slowly near the ground.

There are lots of people defending this PR piece because it sounds cool. This happens every time a new way to 'catch drones' comes out. Yes, golden eagles are extremely majestic. The reality however is that bullets are by far the best way to take down an unwanted UAV. Please, think about the realities of this: several hard blades going hundreds of mph is something you can only stop with a bullet. It doesn't matter if you put a super-suit on your eagles - at best, you'll just make the eagles die of internal bleeding instead.

Finally, if this UAV is flying over a city, it'll be very often above roofs/rivers/canals/etc where it's safe to crash. Give some special ops 20 minutes of training on shooting UAVs and a bullet, not a bunch of raptors that'll end up dead - that's the way to protect your city.

[0] https://raptorresource.blogspot.nl/2015/11/how-much-can-bald...

Area denial is a useful. Someone flying a drone at someone making a speech, a 747, or a football stadium then getting it to land in a parking lot is fine.

Anyway, you can build mortar's for under 100$. Rockets are a flexible terms, but 10 for under 20,000 is very possible. Importantly your drone needs to carry the box and what blows up where a rocket can be the box that blows up messing with your payload calculation.

PS: "Rockets red glare" refers to a mechanically simple devices that are still useful weapons.

>However, you don't really want to fire up into the air in the middle of a domestic city, making birds a more interesting option.

Shotguns with bird-shot would be effective and are comparatively low risk to bullets.

Golden eagles can do 320km/h in dives, normal flight is 45-52km/h but they can sustain around 129km/h horizontal flight for some time. Peregrine falcons have been clocked diving at 389km/h though 320 km/h is more typical. Thus, several hundred km/h is completely reasonable.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_birds_by_flight_speed

As to rotors they can generally avoid them. However, this is just for off the shelf drones, you can build something that can get past them but it's a lot more effort.

This has nothing to do with peregrine falcons, which are falcons, not eagles and are not being used here. Golden eagles do not usually go over 300 km/hr and 320km/hr is the _maximum speed_ they will hit. Saying 'several hundred', for something that is almost always in the 200s, is disingenuous. If someone has $2.75, I would not say they have 'several dollars'. But that gets into a discussion about if two is considered part of several and that is completely pointless.

In any case, they most certainly cannot 'generally' avoid rotors. I have seen birds of prey - as well as smaller birds - attack and/or collide with UAVs. I have never seen a bird escape uninjured except with a small quadcopter with plastic blades. If someone was orchestrating a terrorist attack they would obviously need some sort of payload, and would not be flying a palm-sized plastic-blade quadcopter.

I think eagles are cool and they're clearly majestic creatures. But using them to catch a set of spinning blades in the sky - when a bullet works just fine - is really stupid.

If something costs 2.75 it's common to say it costs several dollars. Now, you can be picky, but in common usage saying several hundred for 280-320 km/h is not wrong.

Anyway, birds learn so you can train them to avoid the blades. Shooting something near buildings is risky and loud even with buckshot. Birds can also follow terrain etc. So, while this is far from perfect it's not a terrible or useless idea.

> Laser systems would be completely unrealistic for this situation

Rheinmetall has sold Laser systems to protect venues at the Olympics, World Cup and other large events for several years now – and their systems are used by several militaries on their bases and in the field for the same purpose.

Here's a vid of a laser taking down a drone. Looks expensive compared to a shot gun though. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l5qKSKsfUPM&feature=youtu.be...

The problem with a shotgun is proximity. The effective range of most common shotguns (12 or 20 guage) is a lot closer than most people want to be to anything explosive that is on a trajectory towards you!

Punt guns (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punt_gun) could be an option but the range would still be limited and they aren't exactly portable.

Seems like an air burst scatter shot weapon would be more effective. Something like a shotgun with explosive projectiles. Use the concussive blow to cause damage.

What goes up must come down gaining velocity in the process. This is exceedingly dangerous. Google for deaths from guns fired in the air at marriage parties / celebrations.

So... anti-aircraft artillery, then? Or this:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Counter_Rocket,_Artillery,_and...

Maybe a modern version of a punt gun?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punt_gun

The advantage of a not-gun is that you can use them around crowds.

Apparently it works quite well, though.

> Missile? Laser? That's insane. As someone who's worked on UAVs quite a bit, the only thing I'd consider taking them out with - in a situation which necessitated it, like a terrorist attack - is guns. Laser systems would be completely unrealistic for this situation, and using missiles would be absolutely overkill.

Flak?

Predatory birds attack by dive-bombing. You won't see it coming

So equip high end drones with other sensors that let the autopilot deal with the falcon attacks (ie don't rely on a human pilot for detecting and reacting to falcon attacks).

Also, put some anti-falcon-dive-bomb spikes on top of your drone ;-)

You don't need any tech to solve this problem. Simply buy two drones.

I'd estimate one falcon costing easily $100K annually, compared to a $300 consumer drone.

The entire concept is incredibly expensive, doesn't scale and comes with no guarantees, but is certainly loved by the media.

Radio signal hijacking and GPS jamming would solve virtually all non-military drone events. But companies pursuing this rarely get a single mention in the news for the actual advances being made in counter drone technology.

The scenario these address aren't two nation states going to war, one with eagles and the other with drones. The scenario is the once-per-decade terrorist attack, in which case losing an eagle or two to mitigate the attack is worthwhile.

> The scenario these address aren't two nation states going to war, one with eagles and the other with drones.

Was this as weird to type as it was to envision?

>solve virtually all non-military drone events

That's the same scenario I'm talking about. Overpowering the input signals is a proven, scalable defense that can be easily deployed to police forces, stadiums, national monuments across the world and for minimal cost. You simply will not be able to do that with a highly trained eagle.

$100k per falcon per year? That seems a little high to me. In any case, governments have enough money to ignore these kinds of calculations.

True. When you look at it from a financial point of view, you are absolutely right. Drone is quite a bit cheaper than falcon, so...

I will put a spike on it. Also I might just remotely detonate the drone. I can buy drones, training a falcon takes time.

I think a more fundamental problem is cost: Building one more explosive-drone is probably cheaper than raising and training one more bird, so an attacker would just send N+1 drones against N birds, and whichever drones detect interference can explode into shrapnel.

> Given the brittle, hollow nature of bird bones

Maybe they could make them little reinforced booties of kevlar and steel-sheathed talons? :P

Over in the realm of sci-fi, its interesting to contemplate bird-safe EMP grenades, or a neural-tap that makes the birds part of a spotter/targeting system for ground-based lasers.

> Maybe they could make them little reinforced booties of kevlar and steel-sheathed talons? :P

From TFA:

> "The military is designing mittens of leather and Kevlar, an anti-blast material, to protect their talons," Agence France-Presse reported.

The problem for terrorists is not the cost of drones, but to acquire the explosives.

For that matter, the drones don't solve any problem real-world terrorists really have. They are usually discovered while planning attacks or acquiring weapons and explosives. Putting a bomb near a lot of people is comparatively easy.

Uhm... I don't think it's hard at all to acquire the materials to build a bomb. I'm not disputing it's still the hard part of planning a terrorist attack, still... A teenager can get a kilo of ammonium nitrate online for 10 dollars, at least where I live.

Maybe ANFO bombs aren't that powerful, but those can't be the only easy options for DIY bombs.

I don't really see how it's a useful priority to try to physically stop terrorist attacks. There obviously aren't that many people who successfully commit them (because the number of related deaths is tiny) and the talk of "well we're stopping a load of them you just don't know because it's classified", yeah... they say that, but why should I believe unqualified statements about other people's secrets?

Why not focus on the factors that make people radicalize, and work on reducing those?

I guess it makes shitty headlines compared to "Kevlar-coated military drone hunting eagles kick evil khaki-person ass".

Explosives that are powerfull enough to cause serious damage in quantities small enough to be carried by an off the shelf drone are much harder to acquire than ammonium nitrate.

Also buying the large quantities of DIY explosive components needed to build large bombs will raise red flags.

Hell, I never even considered multiple quads. Look at how "prey" birds avoid falcons and eagles right now, flocks, or in a more cool fashion, murmurations, which in addition to being super cool, are also an effective defense against them- and intel's swarming technology could be a downright prefect representation of the same idea.

Another cheap defence for the drone is simply to change direction or altitude radically when an appropriate sensor detects an incoming eagle. The eagle is in a dive and has limited maneuverability.

Or, if the eagle does grab you, simply explode (as already stated elsewhere) and take out the defence, while one of your swarm buddies completes the mission.

Even better, use cheap drones to kill the birds with explosives say, leaving your mission-critical drone to do its job.

With decent propellers, you won't even need explosives if the bird tries to catch it - so simply use decoy drones, carrying random junk of mass equal to that of the bomb, just like decoys on MIRV payloads.

>Building one more explosive-drone is probably cheaper than raising and training one more bird, so an attacker would just send N+1 drones against N birds

I'm not sure terrorist organisations, people using drones to fly over restricted airspace (many french cities are), etc, have the same budget than western miltaries...

For every terrorist organisation (whatever that means) that I can name, I can also name a nation that has funded them often western. Britain, USA, France, Israel and Russia come to mind. I'm sure others can be readily found.

Yeah but unless a VIP constantly travels with two trucks full of birds, N will always be a small number, even if the country can afford more.

They could also just use one of these[1] jamming devices to take down the drone.

[1]http://newatlas.com/battelles-dronedefender-beam-gun-uavs/39...

Control systems for drones typically run on 2.4GHz, but they don't have to. The 70cm band (433MHz typical) is available for people with amateur radio licenses (or people who don't care). There are also 3G chips (Particle Electron) that you can use to send telemetry commands if your drone has a GPS and a compatible auto-pilot flight controller.

Getting a video signal back is normally done on 5.8GHz, but there is hardware readily available for 900MHz, 1.2GHz, 2.4GHz, and 3.3GHz. And if you're an enterprising fellow you can send the video on any frequency (NTSC or PAL).

Basically, you can't block it all without serious collateral "damage".

Edit: I've been building and flying drones for over two years, both FPV racing types and larger photography/videography platforms.

This is becoming a tad complicated and with a lots of steps involved for just bombing things isn't it? I mean Tony Stark could it in a cave, but could Joe Terrorist do it?

ps: I shouldn't talk about the costs effectiveness of terror bombing, but it doesnt' seem like something those guys would do, car bombing seem like a "good" enough approach in general.

As a constant follower of the /r/syriancivilwar sub-reddit for the last 2 and a half years all I can say is that one should never under-estimate the technical capabilities and know-how of the other side, be they religious fundamentalists like ISIS or tha AQ-affiliated factions from outside Aleppo and from the province of Idlib. Judging by the many videos of ISIS in action thag I've seen I can say that they were pretty quick in using and mastering drones for their military purposes, along with satellite maps and (I think custom-made) tablet apps.

I agree. It's the XXI century. There is Internet. Point any country on Earth, and you can bet you'll find there many software developers and electrical engineers, be it hobby or professional.

I've seen this or other similar ideas a number of times, and I have no faith that they would work outside commercial copters- I mean, right off the bat, the jamming is more likely to explode any bombs than anything else- and the military already has anti-jamming technology, or you could just use a nonstandard frequency, which from what I understand would also circumvent any jamming.

As far as I'm concerned, almost all anti-drone devices are complete shams.

Then they just use what the military call an "anti radiation" method of target homing.

A crude suicidal drone with programming to 'avoid obstacles' + 'head to the source of the jamming signal' + 'blow up as near to the target as possible'.

Side note: "Anti Radiation Drone" sounds like some sort of scifi awesome sauce if you ask me.

The military already uses anti-radiation missiles with home-on-jam capabilities extensively.

Here's the US model, which will carry a 66kg HE warhead to 150 km: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AGM-88_HARM

The Israeli Harop[0] and Harpy[1] are literally Anti-Radiation drones in service today.

0 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IAI_Harop

1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IAI_Harpy

Doesn't work if the drone is autonomous.

I wonder, at which point do we get to MAVs that are so small and agile that a room full of 300 humans could not grab even one of 300 mavs even if they tried really hard.

In other words every time the MAV sees something coming at it, it redirects is flight in microseconds to avoid it, like a fly. Imagine such swarms infiltrating any size crowd without ever getting caught.

You could incapacitate a whole crowd via MAVs landing and causing electroshocks. Or administering a pathogen.

http://voices.nationalgeographic.com/2014/04/10/insects-frui...

Apparently it works without serious injuries. I had the same initial reaction. The bird is apparently supposed to carry the whole drone (or at least try to), which also puts a limit on the size of drones.

Bird's feet have a very tough hide. And these eagles seem to have leather cuffs.

Also wild eagles have been known to go after drones with no problems...

They kind of relie on a certain type of frame so they can grab the drone. I have cut myself pretty badly with drone propellers, I think people underestimate how powerfull those things are. No chance eagles would be a good counter-measure.

>I have cut myself pretty badly with drone propellers

On the other hand, can you kill a deer with your bare hands ?

> On the other hand, can you kill a deer with your bare hands ?

I don't know, never tried it. Maybe. But that is irrelevant to the matter at hand, an eagle would get fucked up by fast-spinning propellers no matter of its ability to kill a deer. They are just pieces of meat with bone through them, mo matter their speed and athletic ability.

As to the drones itself, for carrying heavy loads most likey they would use and X8 design. I once had the nasty pleasure of flipping an X8 drone upside down and for some reason, don't remember why, lost control and propellers were spinning full throttle, upside down. As you can imagine, it was a spinning death-machine and the only clearance I had to grab it was an 10x10cm square right in the middle of the drone. It was terrifying, but managed to stop it. I can't imagine an eagle grabbing it anywhere without it getting messed up.

As a side-note, a decent X8 mid-sized-lift drone can be custom buit for under 500E. I don't know how much an eagle would cost.

Again: According to video footage, it does seem to work.

It seems to work for that model of drone. Extending that it works for "drones" and more so for terrorist drones is quite a stretch.

I have a DIY drone 10 feet from me, it was deisgned for medium loads, not for killing eagles but I'm willing to put it to the test if an eagle can crash it without dieing.

X8 drones with carbon fiber blades would give no chance whatsoever to the eagle.

Are you questioning whether the military would hesitate to put the life and limb of birds at risk? I'm sure the training is as safe as it can be (just like for humans) but all bets are off in an actual hostile situation.

These birds take down full sized wolves. I think they will have a chance at immortalizing a drown. And it's a bird if it loses it's life and saved one human then so be it. Please don't post stuff from reddit it's full of idiots.

We forget that raptors are protected species.

In USA you can't even keep the dropped feathers of a bald eagle in your house. Is illegal without a very special permit. To kill and chop bald eagles with a drone would be symbolically an huge success and desirable goal for any terrorist. This birds can't be easily exported to France or other countries for its huge symbolic value

In Europe is the same. To deliberately train a golden eagle to fly across a meat mincer would upset a lot of people sweating blood and tears 365 days/year for protecting predators. You would need to pass law exceptions for all EU and argue the convenience to do so. To use the highly endangered Eastern Imperial Eagles for this would be even worse and unforgivable. The trainer will be sued and will face a lot of legal issues.

For Pete's sake, this is idiot! just use another drone for that!

Still, an anti-robot eagle program would improve the population of golden eagles, and I doubt many of them would see combat. Conservationists seem to be pretty enthusiastic about falconing as a way of getting bird-of-prey numbers up; this should produce similar opportunities.

Falcons are not teared apart each time they fly.

I have a better idea. What if we dismantle the Tour Eiffel and use all this useles iron planks to fix bars in any of the windows of Paris. Would serve two purposes, parisiens would be safer against drones or muslims entering in your room at night and zero risk of somebody putting a bomb in the Tour Eiffel. Win-win situation!.

If we forget all about the legal issues, to fly an $4200 eagle trough a lawmower is a really silly idea and an useless method to stop a drone unless your goal is spending so many money from the french as you can, as fast as possible. Eagles can not carry drones of more than 3kg so they will still drop the bombs in a dangerous unpredictable trajectory. With a target big enough the difference between having an eagle or not could be a few hundred dollars more in damages (with eagle). I can understand the coolness of having a powerful eagle sitting in your fist and parade in front of a bunch of chicks, but this is either an hoax, or PR (most probably) or the boys had seen too many times the Hobbit.

Like I said, I doubt many of them would see combat. Aren't attacks by explosive quadcopter drones still hypothetical?

They are being hatched specifically for this purpose.

These aren't random eagles captured in the wild.

I hope so, because to capture protected species in the wild is a crime.

In any case even if you can keep an endangered species in captivity in a few special cases, you still could not deliberately put in danger the life of those captive species, because is not a cool toy, is a protected species by both the european and also the french laws. It does not matter if hatched for this or for that. Is still illegal. You can't even let fly freely this species in a public space like a city without breaking the law.

For USA see: The Bald and Golden Eagle Protection Act (16 U.S.C. 668-668d)

In European community "Member states shall prohibit, for species in Annex 1 (that includes Aquila pomarina, Aquila clanga, Aquila heliaca, Aquila adalberti, Aquila chrysaetos, Hieraaetus fasciatus and Hieraaetus pennatus among other species) the sale, transport for sale, keeping for sale and the offering for sale of live or dead birds and of any recognisable parts or derivatives of such birds". Also eggs. And of course to deliberately annoy or harm this species is strictly forbidden. See directive 2009/147/EC

how much is an eagle and a trainer? that times 10 is easily within the pr budget of your average large military

i not saying a poor animal being is being hurt in the blades of the drone for a military pr stunt

rather, it's shown as victorious

Animals are, by law, treated as property, not sentient beings, so one dead bird is nothing in the realm of anthropocentric humanity. If it fulfills the purpose man has given it's enough of a justification not to take animal's wishes as morally relevant.

Do you have a citation for that? As far as I understand it, the nature of animal sentience is a very widely debated subject.

If you define sentience to mean "the ability to feel or perceive," then a wide array of animals are sentient. Look at any pet cat or dog to see a display of feelings like fear, excitement, or curiosity.

If you take a more narrow definition of "being aware of one's own existence," I imagine you would still find a number of animals who fit into the category.

An African Grey Parrot, while learning colors, asked what color his feathers were. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alex_(parrot); I would imagine there is a strong likelihood that you would probably see similar levels of self-awareness from other animals if we had a better way of testing for it.

After all, there's nothing so special about Humans and Parrots in particular, is there?

Citation for what? Animals are by law treated as property. I just explained why someone would think of a solution as ridiculous as that. Parent points out that the solution is not practical but it's clearly demonstrated in the video that it is.

Given that the world we live in is focused on human convenience, with gluttony based on non-human animal flesh, it's really hard to be surprised.

When you have engineers making efficient assembly lines for slaughtering chickens, cows, pigs, all sentient, feeling animals, how is using eagles for fetching drones not the same act of dismissing animal's wishes as morally relevant, or starving dogs for finding truffles, or any human centered activity that risks the life and well being of another non-human animal?

Here's a guy facing 2 years prison for hitting a dog. I'm not sure your legal argument holds. http://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/nyc-crime/plumber-faces-...

https://www.animallaw.info/statute/ny-cruelty-consolidated-c...

Imagine that, and yet here's French police training eagles to fetch drones. Each training session a risk of serious injury. If something happens it obviously wouldn't be considered cruelty.

Animal cruelty is a different matter. For example, lifetime imprisonment of a dairy cow isn't cruelty. Or free-range boxed-in-a-huge-building chickens in the dark isn't cruelty.

Truffle collectors that starve their dogs - also isn't considered cruelty.

advocating for ownership over beings, huh?

Of course not. I'm advocating for humans to stop using sentient feeling beings and risk their lives in their solutions to problems (from diet, clothes, companionship to catching drones). Aren't we more creative than that? Human anthropocentrism at its finest yet I get the scorn.

I presume you live without the benefit of modern medicine then?

Good thing that utilitarianism is a well known concept. If I weren't aware of that I'd be living in an absolutist nightmare of a world where everything was made necessary for use and abuse of non-human animals.

Do take in mind that animal testing is an old practice, and there's plenty of evidence that data collected on non-human animals is useless in most cases. So, modern medicine would do a lot to find new ways of testing and making in-vitro or some other models of human biological system.

Here's a nice popsci http://www.livescience.com/46147-animal-data-unreliable-for-... article of how bad of a classifier non-human animal testing really is.

I guess now you will point to my inability to use antivenom when miraculously a snake bites me under my office table.

Animal testing is reasonable for pretty much all medical advances in use today. Simply claiming it is not does not make it so.

Remember, you can't use most vaccines or epinephrine either. Do you carry around a alert bracelet informing EMT's to not revive you should you require epinephrine?

Never claimed it wasn't reasonable. It's not as efficient as one might think. Having an 8% precision is ridiculously low.

Given that all of vaccines and medical treatments are tested on animals it is quite obvious I should not want to use any of them. I thought your initial remark made that point but it seems to me you were looking at the ingredients.

The amount of animals being abused by medicine has dropped significantly, I'm not an absolutist and yes I'd definitely do my best not to require medical attention. Would I be stupid enough to endanger other animals by not vaccinating myself or my children?

Your last remark is a little bit more inventive than the "anti-venom" one but it is still coming from an absolutist framework.

So if we agree it is acceptable to use animals sometimes in order to advance a greater good, who decides where that line is? Doesn't your belief look somewhat like a religious one in this case in that while you adhere to them you certainly cannot ask anyone else as well as they may not hold the same values as you do?

There's quite a clear time when not using or not abusing non-human animals was impossible. It's quite clear from all the data that the effort should go towards better biological models and away from wasteful random variable measuring which physics does so well but medicine does it by abusing billions of animals to show a statistically significant discovery.

Are you really claiming eagles are the last line of defense against drones? That is what I get from your line of reasoning. The only reason why they decided to use eagles is because it is convenient, some idiot came up with it and given that non-human animals don't get the same moral considerations as humans (speciesism alert!) it was acceptable and ignored from the stance of non-human animal cruelty.

So, if a serial killer doesn't hold the same values as I do, I guess it's fine for him to kill? Or is it not fine just because he's killing homo sapiens? What if he was killing homo erectus?

We do share the same values. I'm just making my actions consistent with those values. I'm coming from the same sentiment OP had.

> So, if a serial killer doesn't hold the same values as I do, I guess it's fine for him to kill?

This is why democracy was invented. The people decide what laws they wish to have. You haven't answered my question. Who decides what is right if not the people?

It's a pretty simple answer.

Slavery was convenient yet it was abolished.

Democracy brought Hitler, yet what he did people did not condone.

If people decide what is right and yet due to convenience act inconsistently it is worthless.

Being born into a world where slavery is convenience didn't make one decide that slavery is right. Just like use of animals or eating their flesh, wearing their skin wasn't one's decision to do it. One was raised in the convenience framework which was some time ago "necessary" and currently isn't. One was nurtured and educated to find it fine but the current values made it inconsistent.

It is not right given our current values. It is now a question of how do people get out of their indoctrination and convenience to stand up for what they believe is right.

> It is not right given our current values.

Citation needed.

> stand up for what they believe is right

That isn't my belief system, hence the disagreement. Do I have to stand up for what you think is right?

> Citation needed.

What kind of citation? This request is a little bit of a stretch. The majority of people on Earth identify as followers of abrahamic religions. Bunch of them accept the ideas of love, compassion and empathy as a foundation of their religions. You see where the reasoning goes from there.

> That isn't my belief system, hence the disagreement. Do I have to stand up for what you think is right?

Moral relativism really won't help you here. From everything you've written it is very unlikely that you are a consistent speciesist.

As I've said before, you were brought up through convenience, you didn't choose your values, but you interpret them as choice. It is equivalent to people growing up when slavery was acceptable. Even hundreds of years after the war there was still a huge bunch accepting discrimination as a right thing to do.

You are also avoiding the subject.

You are mentioning greater good, last resort methods etc. etc. Eagles aren't last resort, meat every day in your plate, drinking another mammals milk isn't last resort or greater good, raising 60 billions of animals every year, cutting rainforests for soybeans and corn, emitting huge amounts of CO2 and methane for the sake of steak isn't greater good.

I'm not really sure which straw you are reaching for? If you do not care about global warming, about animals (including human animal), if you really do not care, then yes, you are consistent speciesist but that is very unlikely.

Most of the conversations I had people did admit they discriminate because it is convenient and if only this other choice was more convenient they'd do it. They put themselves first. They also saw the hypocrisy and inconsistency of their actions.

Eagles being used for drones, dogs eaten in China, all stem from the speciesism that is indoctrinated through all pillars of growing up.

My point is you happen to feel this way. If everyone felt the way you did, it would be illegal. Thus a great number of people don't feel the way you do or simply don't care. Thus the system is working as intended. The people have spoken.

Cool, so by your definition of right, heterosexual supremacy, male dominance, slavery, racism, are all right because a majority guided by convenience and traditional beliefs thinks it's right.

Reuters photo for a visual effect of an intercept: http://www.reuters.com/news/picture/photos-of-the-week?artic...

>four eggs "were placed before birth on top of drones while still inside the eggshell and, after hatching, kept them there during their early feeding period

Why did they put the eggs on drones? Wouldn't that make the eagles think they are parents or related.

Why not use autonomous drone swarms to attack enemy drones (any that does not respond with correct security certificate, for example) rather than a very costly solution, which while interesting and clever and lo tech, isn't viable in warfare scenarios.

Likely because falconers want funding just as much as drone builders.

But there might be more: having a heavy hunter-seeker drone over a crowd would be nearly as bad as having the occasional rogue drone there. Birds, with their amazingly low mechanical failure rate might be the preferable way of keeping reasonable people reasonable. Sensitive parts of the sky need to be kept clear of non-malicious, but nonetheless rogue drones not only because of accident risk, but also to get a clear threat indication from the malicious ones. "Probably just some kid who ran out of things to film with their gopro" is not very helpful when assessing the relative risks of a violent takedown over a crowd.

Based on the existing drone combat leagues - a lightweight drone with lots of streamers would do better than a heavyweight drone with any form of weaponry.

Foul the props, and the drone will go down.

Of course, I've also watched an expensive camera octocopter tip itself over and dive bomb the dirt because of a nearby antenna overpowering their delicate GPS.

then you just need the correct certificate

Consider for moment why the French are training eagles to take down drones: bombs. Now think about how the eagles are dealing with the drones... They knock them out of the sky. I can't be the only one seeing a problem with this.

"Use the 'interference gun'". If that works, and it's a BIG "if", the drone will either land or fall to the ground. Bombs away! Seriously, it's just as bad as an eagle crashing into it. Real gun? Same problem with the added bonus of a bullet going through the drone and continuing on its journey to who-knows-where.

So what's a government to do? The only solution I can see that removes the threat of a bomb going off is this: a much larger drone (650mm and above octocopter) armed with a net gun. The key here is to have the net tethered to the drone so it can carry the hostile drone away to a safe area. The drone-mounted net gun already exists (Excipio), just have to get the net tethered to the drone.

Bombs have an arming mechanism that triggers some time after they're released. They won't automatically explode just because they hit the ground.

A free falling drone bomb might. But more importantly: this isn't military grade munitions. This is home made acetone peroxide and the like I.e. highly unstable

This approach is not all that new, but it's a clicky headline so it keeps coming back as news organizations cover it again and again. I remember seeing this over a year ago, and before that was well (in 2015 as I recall). A quick search shows a lot of coverage last year of Dutch police doing the same thing: http://www.wired.co.uk/article/eagle-vs-drone

They talk about that in the article.

> A solution presented itself in an experiment by Dutch police, who last year used a trained eagle to pluck a DJI Phantom drone out of the air, Peter Holley reported for The Washington Post.

Why not use drones to catch drones? The japanese, or more specifically, the tokyo police is doing that. Is that not really viable?

That sounds a lot more realistic but it's not as cool and romantic as eagles swooping in.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WgCNVdYzIcw

This is incredibly stupid. As I've posted elsewhere here, drones have a chance to outfly and outmaneuver the golden eagles used in the program. Then, assuming the eagles catch up, they still have to deal with blades - with wingtips spinning at hundreds of miles per hour. There's no way they can survive the blades: every bird I've seen that encounters a UAV either was instantly killed or permanently disabled. I've worked with drones enough to know what will and won't stop them. A bird won't: it'll brush the blades and fall to the ground in a bloody mess. A bullet will. Bullets are tried and true technology, we know how to use them, they're not ridiculously expensive, and they will certainly take down any drone of reasonable size.

This is PR, plain and simple. There's no other explanation for it, unless France's air force is hilariously incompetent, which I would doubt.

"The military is designing mittens of leather and Kevlar, an anti-blast material, to protect their talons"

Also, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HifO-ebmE1s

Maybe it won't work for all drones, but bullets would drop drones into the crowds below, so the idea catching them in the air is not that stupid. It's just one of the ideas the police is exploring.

If a bird catches a UAV, it's not going to be able to carry it off either. Golden eagles in particular cannot carry very much. You can find videos of them using their impressive wingspan to momentarily generate enough lift to carry dogs or goats, but that is only momentary. As you can see here [0], golden eagles can't even carry 1kg for more than a brief amount of time.

And you've got to be kidding me. "Mittens of leather and Kevlar"? How about you put on some leather-kevlar gloves and then try to touch a spinning blade, with the tips going hundreds of miles per hour. It would be like a heavy caliber bullet against a bulletproof vest.

This is PR, plain and simple. It's completely and totally ridiculous and wouldn't work unless the 'terrorists' were completely incompetent and flying tiny drones. (I'll remind you that a tiny drone can't carry much payload, which would probably be the purpose of a terrorist attack.)

Somewhere, entirely separate from the people working on this PR project, someone in the French military is hopefully looking at realistic ways to take down drones safely, e.x. bullets. But I can only hope that this isn't a serious effort and is only PR, otherwise I'd be extremely worried.

[0] https://raptorresource.blogspot.nl/2015/11/how-much-can-bald...

Ya but these birds are not just any old birds they eat wolves for dinner

I think the reason that the French are investing in this solution is because other cheaper (or more effective) interceptor drone technology is still not ready to be used.

To think that the French army is not also investing on hunter drones is to severely underestimate the intelligence of that army.

Magnets? EMP's? Is that still considered too sci-fi?

What a scalable solution.

It is not meant to scale, it's a way to take down drones without shooting in crowded areas.

having high precision rifles with assisted aiming systems is surely way more effective.

I'm not sure if you're aware, but bullets don't always stop when they hit something... Over-penetration is a very real problem with very real consequences.

Shooting guns in a crowded environment may cause panic.

May?

A bunch of falcons dive bombing at drones might cause some panic, too.

Got to wonder the damage that will happen to the bird. The larger drones which these tests are for would do some serious damage to the birds legs if the pilot kept the motors turning. If the pilot is intent on breaking away, they would not care about the birds well being.

Some of these drones also put out a fair amount of thrust so even if the drone is upside-down it could quite easily pull down the bird.

Somehow I feel that this training of large birds to catch drones just has not been thought through. Would a net cannon not but more successful especially when using high tensile netting. For mobility, attach net cannon to police multi rotor.

A multirotor carrying a heavy payload is not going to have a lot of thrust to spare to apply to the bird. The rotors only typically run in one direction as well, so it couldn't suddenly apply counter thrust.

Most multirotor autopilots also would behave in a very expected fashion when disturbed, making them pretty predictable.

Iron Beam is an already commercialized laser system, an alternative to Iron Dome missile defense against rockets and UAVs:

https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Iron_Beam

This sounds much better than eagles. One issue with eagles is that they have to be taken care of, fed, and deployed when needed.

This is like the old mechanization vs cavalry debate. Machines have many more benefits than just how they function at a specific task (ie, they dont get tired).

Not going to work well, save for small drones capable of ridiculous payloads; a big one with more powerful engines and stronger props would seriously damage or kill the bird. To me the best way to neutralize a drone is by shooting it with a thin but strong steel net from another smaller and faster one: instant stop + faraday cage effect that probably also severs its connection with the launch base instantly.

The article doesn't actually mention any examples of drones used by terrorists. The closest they get is a purely military action somewhere in Iraq.

We had a related earlier discussion about ISIS terrorists using commercial drones as bombers. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13497150

This is not an unreasonable idea. I'm just going to leave this here. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hr-xBtVU4lg

You can't hack an Eagle!

I am very sceptical about using eagles to stop drones. Eagles are more expensive to train and maintain, and they die.

The only viable solution against harmful drones are drones themselves.

The more I think about it, the more I think this is a bluf to push drone designers to overengineer their devices.

Eagles are not scalable, but it is way simpler to train a handful of them as a proof of concept than to eagle-proof existing designs of drones. And given physical and engineering limits, every countermeasure implemented in a drone will cut into the effective payload that is available for the drone to carry on its actual function.

The eagles were never meant to defeat the drones, but to force their designers to handicap those.

Alright, so they're getting leather gloves and are named after musketeers. How about equipping them with rapiers? Disable the drone blades with blades!

In the movie Legends of the Guardians the owls use steel over-talons to battle their enemies, that approach could be used here too.

From the article: "The military is designing mittens of leather and Kevlar, an anti-blast material, to protect their talons"

"on the other side of the world" - half way down the article but omitted from the title.

Another fact to consider here also is that eagles do not fly at night.

Wouldn't it just be easier to shoot the drones down?

That is a seriously large bird!

Talk about animal abuse lol

Read this months ago, why is this news?

A simple automatic pneumatic injection gun delivering 2 laser-targeted shots of 30m distance, like this baby http://www.haevic.co.za/index.php/products-services/the-dart... can put eagle to a safe sleep, and ensure mission is not interrupted.

If you're less than 30 meters away from your drone and possess weapons though... what's the use of the drone?

That's just not at all the kind of situation this is intended for.

Is that against a moving target through turbulent air?

Even easier: Build two drones, and have whichever one gets grabbed blow up immediately.

That did not go where I thought it would.

(I was expecting some kind of net gun for the drones.)

Well there are already deployed drones with tranquilizer dart guns that target humans. Used as "drone fencing" of sensitive areas. Example shooting from hexacopter: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tNOL9Kz2WNE

> Example shooting from hexacopter: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tNOL9Kz2WNE

Uhm, that's not real or related. That's some guy's visual-effects project, and the drone is CGI.

Perhaps you meant the manufacturer's movie here? Good luck shooting a diving eagle. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OItoIIoSefI

Wonder how this would fair on a predator drone firing hellfire missiles.

You mean the drones that are actually inflicting fear and terror on populations unlike the little camera drones the west is so afraid off.

Yep!

With stakes that high, you can always put an explosive payload on the eagle.

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