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Wearables For Animals Totally A Thing
Is there a way to predict when a cow is about to calve? There's good money in it if you can. Farmer Niall Austin thinks he can, but he needs tech help.
(Moocall CEO Savage with hi-tech product)
Since childhood, Niall had made an observation concerning the distinct tail movements of a cow when it is about to calve and, following the loss of a calf on his own farm, Niall came up with an innovative idea to help farmers pinpoint the timing of labour."The loss of a cow or calf is a large financial loss to a farmer, so Niall did some Google research and saw that there was no viable product on the market to help ensure that this did not happen again," Emmet explains.
"So at that point, Niall approached me and I knew a little bit about farming because as a child I had milked some cows and I knew that finding out when a cow was going to calve was a big problem for farmers. They were up in the middle of the night, looking to see what cows were in calf, so that they could intervene, if necessary.
"I knew Niall was on to something when he said that there is definitely something in the way a cow's tail can be interpreted to identify when it is due to calve," Emmet says.
"So we embarked on a 'proof of concept' design at that point and in order to do that, Michael Stanley - who is also the CEO of Cairn Homes and a very good friend of mine - and myself put some initial seed capital into the business and we engaged with various partners to work out if tail movements could in fact be used to tell when a cow was going to calve."
I think wearables for animals is an absolutely crazy idea that will totally work. And this is just the beginning. In Johnny Mnemonic, William Gibson wrote about Jones, a military surplus dolphin cyborg.
(Jones the cyborg dolphin from the movie version)
He rose out of the water, showing us the crusted plates along his sides, a kind of visual pun, his grace nearly lost under armor, clumsy and prehistoric. Twin deformities on either side of his skull had been engineered to house sensor units. Silver lesions gleamed on exposed sections of his gray-white hide.
(Read more about William Gibson's cyborg dolphin)
Animals have been getting wearables before this, though; I just remembered this article about Digital Squab Line (DSL) Has High Bandwidth . Check it out.
Via Independent.
Scroll down for more stories in the same category. (Story submitted 9/30/2016)
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I might also be thinking of K-9 from Doctor Who.
