Scaring Animals Can Help Save Them | Hacker News Reader

Scaring Animals Can Help Save Them

scientificamerican.com

33 pointsdraenei18 comments

A few years ago I opened my breezeway door, accidentally scared a rabbit and it ran right in front of a car :( Now, if I see an animal and what I'm about to do is going to startle it, I try to position myself, or wait until they're in a position that it will likely run away from any dangerous things. At the very least, I wait for traffic to clear.

I picked up my son to let him see a moose over a fence, and the startled animal bolted towards a busy street a short distance away. Fortunately, it didn't run out in the road.

I felt like such an idiot. I could've killed someone due to one thoughtless moment. Moose are notoriously stupid when it comes to cars. They become agitated and alert when approached on foot, but they will stand next to cars going freeway speeds with no apparent concern or understanding of the danger.

You could develop an automatic paintball turret which shoots at elk. Or the occasional golfer, when the algorithm fails.

the prospect of youtube videos of golfers getting shot by the wildlife paintball turret alone justifies this idea!

"Militarizing Your Backyard with Python: Computer Vision and the Squirrel Hordes"

https://pyvideo.org/pycon-us-2012/militarizing-your-backyard...

From the article:

« And “how much does a paintball hurt a 500- or 1,000-pound animal?” asks Robert Found, a wildlife expert at Elk Island National Park in Alberta. “That’s not enough of a stimulus.” »

But I'm willing to give it a try, because I'd like to see multicolored elk (and golfers).

But how can we prevent situations like what happens to coyotes who learn not to be scared? http://www.epsilontheory.com/too-clever-by-half/

From the article: "Other researchers have explored more noxious ideas to drive animals away from people, including paint balls, rubber bullets, squirt guns, specially trained dogs and park rangers swinging streamers attached to hockey sticks. Some of these are effective, some are not. Some animals learn to avoid human areas but others just learn to avoid rangers with hockey sticks. And “how much does a paintball hurt a 500- or 1,000-pound animal?” asks Robert Found, a wildlife expert at Elk Island National Park in Alberta. “That’s not enough of a stimulus.”"

I think using an unloaded double-barrel shotgun to aim a bottle rocket at a coyote might be successful at scaring them if a paintball didn't do it.

If you've got the shotgun in hand, some #2 game loads will smarten up coyotes a lot more effectively. At least the survivors anyway.

Many projectile options are likely to only be legal in more rural areas. For example, our local municipal code states:

    "No Shooting" means any shotgun, fowling piece, rifle, BB gun, air compression rifle, pellet gun, revolver, pistol, or other firearm which projects any bullet, shot, slug, pellet, BB, or any other missile or projectile of any nature.

Cayotes are not endangered, so maybe it’s not a species of concern. I suppose if their pop dwindled it coild be a problem.

My wife read a book called Coyote America [1] a while back that was really interesting from what she told me of it. One thing that I thought was really interesting is that coyotes responded to population control / elimination efforts by just having a ton more babies, which sort of made the effort completely backfire.

I guess not all that related, but reading your post triggered the memory, so I thought I'd make a comment.

[1] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/26195972-coyote-america?...

Coyotes, crows, and raccoons are cited as three species that have done better as urban animals than their country brethren.

I’m not thrilled about the quasi-domestication of coyotes, however I’m thoroughly intrigued by raccoons and crows.

Raccoons: I'd like to start an urban trapping program where the least human-fearing specimens are collected, dewormed, vaccinated, and assessed for sociability. The most sociable are bred, and the least sociable are neutered. I want this for purely selfish reasons as raccoons (trash pandas) are objectively adorable. I reckon this will take fewer generations than the Soviet artic silver fox experiment.

For crows, I’d like to see them become urban cleanup crews... crow crews. Train them to deposit cigarette butts, heroin needles, or whatever other undesirable detritus into safe disposal stations in trade for peanuts. Yes, crows will totally work for peanuts.

It’s time to stop thinking that dogs, horses, and other domesticated service animals should be the only species pressed into service for mankind.

> Yes, crows will totally work for peanuts.

They may even prefer them (if whole, in shell) to other "payment". Even though they're fairly bulky, they're not much heavier, and the shell makes for a great preservative, even exposed to weather.

Personally, I like using peanuts because it allows me to feed corvids selectively, even in the presence of gulls, who either don't know how or are physically incapable of opening the shell.

Boston dynamics has some funky robots, maybe we can train the animals by getting robots to wander around scaring them.

... and that's how we accidentally killed off everyone with weak heart.

That's fine. We'll need the survivors with their strong cardiovascular systems to fight the robots off when they attack.

When they grab you with those metal claws, you can't break free.. because they're made of metal, and robots are strong.

Sounds like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Insular_dwarfism

I find this method works well with humans too.

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