Cowboys are famous for their rough-n-tough macho lifestyles. However, their seemingly adventurous lifestyle may have many sorrows of its own - the loss of the cattle being one of the gravest of them! It’s certainly not at all an easy task to take care of the hordes of the hundreds of cattle, especially during their grazing spree when each one can drift in any direction it wishes and thereafter getting misplaced.
The guys at the MIT in collaboration with its Department of Agriculture have come up with an innovative GPS hat that mounts on each animal’s head and transmits its geographical coordinates to the central server. The hat generates a music signal if the animal drifts away from the prespecified area. If this attempt fails after a certain amount of time, the hat generates a weak electric shock so that the animal gets back into its permitted boundaries, without any human intervention. Once there, it isn’t harmed with the notorious shock. However, cows need to be ‘trained’ with this stuff!
As suggested, this equipment has a potential to take away the chances of livelihood of the cowboys as herds could be taken care of by the guys sitting in their boardrooms, thousands of miles away. However, this won’t be a threat as it’s impossible to install the device on each animal’s head. Also, despite whatever the developers claim, no animal would be intelligent enough to return on its own. It’s always going to be the cowboy who does the final nudging!
Source: navigadget
