LASER RAT FENCE wins €1.7m European Commission funds The European Commission (EC) has found €1,777,985 for research on rat-repelling laser fences. The thinking behind the “LIFE Laser Fence” is that birds and rodents chew on plenty of crops, which costs farmers money and reduce productivity. Plenty of farmers fight back using poisons which do the job, but can also prove fatal for …
And those of us smart enough to spot the subtle difference in approach between deterrent and elimination will understand why learning a lesson from an entirely different situation is not actually helpful.
The lasers scare the pests away. They do not kill them.
Going to have to be a very clever laser that distinguishes rats and pests from protected species that it is illegal to interfere with. In fact that reason will likely make this illegal to use in the UK. Shine this at a natterjack toad or a barn owl and cause them to do something that injures them and you'll be heading for a fine or even prison sentence..
Either they're testing this near my office, or they should be. A pigeon flew down the chimney next to my desk this morning, and perched on the back of one of our swivel chairs.
The windows don't open very wide, so I was expecting a bit of a struggle to get the bugger out - and a laser would have come in useful for that too. Managed it with the minimum of flapping and shitting - either from pigeon or me.
Seems like a better solution than random slaughter of wildlife though.
The best method is get a cat.
Adopt a neighbour's cat and encourage it to treat your garden as its home territory - a strategically placed planter of catnip and the giving of treats works wonders and the really good thing with this approach is that you don't have to worry about actually looking after a cat...
Otherwise get a Jack Russell, no cats, mice, rats...
I'd advise against giving it too much food, you don't want it getting overly attached, just interested and to know that's a friendly place, then it'll poop elsewhere making your garden part of the heart of it's territory rather than at the edge.
The key is being nice to it when you see it (or just ignoring it entirely) and putting out small treats every few days, but not daily.
My granny use to do this all the time, kept the cats out of her flower beds and in her neighbours lol
"We currently have the other issue that our neighbours "Ninja cat" sneaking in and nicking our cat's food"
"You can get cat flaps with RFID readers that read the chip in your cat, and only lets the right one(s) in."
My Sister has one and worked well for a while, then the neighbours cat worked out he could get in by tailgating (literally) my sisters cat.... they are damn crafty.
"The best method is get a cat. They don't tend to crap in their own garden, and they are territorial, so generally keep other cats away..."
Not. PBS (here on the left side of the pond) aired a show of a cat population in a small Brit town. "50 felines from the Surrey village of Shamley Green were fitted with GPS collars and 'cat cams'". In viewing the episode, it was discovered that while cats do avoid each other, they end up "sharing" an area by taking shifts. In fact, they discovered that (for the people who had cat doors), other cats come into their homes while the owners are not there and eat the food and share the house!
Thus, getting a cat will not eliminate or keep other cats away, it will simply cause your property to be time shared.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2340714/The-Secret-Life-Cat-What-mischievous-moggies-gets-owners-backs.html#ixzz4OCO7plWc
Thus, getting a cat will not eliminate or keep other cats away, it will simply cause your property to be time shared.
What about if you get a lion?
I admit you may be introducing an even worse poo problem. Although I believe you can sell it to other people to put in their gardens to keep cats away. There's also the problem of food, they're not cheap to feed, and if you're really unlucky, you may be on the menu yourself.
What is "humanus humanus"? Do you mean Pediculus humanus, or perhaps Homo sapiens sapiens?
This post has been deleted by its author
And even birds get used to it after a while.
I visited a cow barn in the Netherlands where they had this system to deter birds. This system moved the beams around the barn. All that happened is that the birds flew from one part of the barn where the laser was pointing to the other part, and kept feeding, whereas initially it would scare them away.
>Birds apparently “perceive the approaching laser beam as a physical danger” and therefore go away instead of stopping to munch on crops.
So they starve to death? Is that the outcome we really want?
We aren't actually short of food, so this is just about profits. Perhaps we should rethink our ecological policy.
Please go re-read the article, slowly and with someone to help with the big words.
It's about stopping or cutting back on the use of poison which causes collateral damage through unintended victims and ultimately finds its way back into the human foodchain through a lengthy but documented process.
OK, it won't happen in the same way, and maybe not so easily. But academic cooperation takes place all round the world; people who want solutions to a problem can deal with any university that's best placed to supply them. It makes no sense to suggest that the criteria for this sort of collaboration are exclusively political or ideological.
Enough of the hand-wringing already.
and maybe not so easily
It's the entire string of maybe-not-so-easily's applied across so many areas like the economy, trade, research, policing, security and travel which is exactly what is worrying so many people. It looks like the government has decided that immigration is the prime concern and everything else should be sacrificed -- if necessary -- upon that altar.
If curbing immigration would solve enough problems to compensate, maybe then it would be worth it, but I don't see that getting to the root causes of our problems with housing, healthcare, education and the deficit. All that's going to happen is that there will be less money available and these problems will simply get worse. But you don't want to hear any of that hand-wringing, do you?
Good news!
Invention is a public good - it matters not one jot whether the mad scientists laughing as they burn through rat retinas are British, French or Korean.
Farmer Giles still gets the benefit simply by buying the resulting products.
So, out of the great pantheon of things that may (or mayn't) be affected by something they we will (or won't) do, leading (or not) to some decisions that no-one can predict, let alone map the consequences off, this is not one of them.
Plus we've got some of the top research universities in the world and so can either remain in the EU research programs (maybe sweetening the deal by upping our budget contribution by a few million) - or if they don't want to play then simply reallocate our share of that budget entirely to our own academics.
As we're a net contributor we can easily replace any EU funded thing ourselves, given we already fund it at the moment. As that's the meaning of net contributor. And there's still money left over that we already pay out to either bribe the EU to agree to continue doing stuff we want (and keep the existing EU budget) - or take back and spend on doing other things.
Brexit would have got get very unfriendly indeed for academic cooperation to stop - I'm sure there are more important things to worry about.
Unless these lasers are on sharks I'm not interested.
What's to say the birds and rats won't evolve and get those little mirrors you see in their cages at pets at home? This won't end well, it'll be an arms race that ultimately results in davros styled rats with mirrors on their head unable to climb stairs.
I think in Liverpool they might be more bothered about rattus norvegicus than rattus rattus as referenced in the article.
In the UK the black rat (rattus rattus) is very rare on the mainland - it used to be common but the introduction of the brown rat (rattus norvegicus) several hundred years ago caused it's downfall as the brown rat took over in most places.
Although some of the last remaining black rat strongholds were ports (such as Liverpool) you would be very unlikely to see one there now.
Thing is when you test this kind of thing it is small scale. The rats just move off to fields with no lasers. But if it works and we protect all the fields like this... where do they rats go.
They'll still be there and still be hungry.
Time for an updated novel from James Herbert?
But wait - 40W? What do you do with all those blind rats and birds?
And more so, what happens when little Johnny comes creeping below the garden fence, looking for a bit of fun, and suddenly has a laser-like enlightening experience?
Mine's the one with the dark glasses in the pocket.
What happens when this shines across a field at a pigeon, misses and blinds the driver of a car and causes an accident? In fact the more I think about it the more stupid this is. Can anyone think of an actual good reason for having one other than fewer pesticides? We don't need to use pesticides - what we need is promotion of predators. More raptors means less rats - buzzards love them.
Against birds this might work but I'm having trouble seeing it being effective against ground-runners, at least after the plants become tall enough and leafy enough to minimize the light getting to ground level. Add in the fact that, unless you have a laser pointing pretty much straight down each row of crops you're soon trying to shine it across multiple rows of foliage, further blocking the effect. (Also raising the issue of SEEING the critters running under the foliage, in order to target them.)
Well, I suppose that's what the testing is for.
...then too, would it make sense to use red lasers instead of the green one shown in the picture? That way, any light blocked by the foliage would at least be feeding the plants, so the farmer is getting some return for the extra drain on his electric bill!
A great leap forward over spring traps and rubber-handled hammers. Well done scientists.
But ... gosh, aren't rats accomplished by centuries of practice and evolutionary adaptation in the business of infiltrating by burrowing underground? Indeed, don't soldiers who are expert in tunneling become the proud owners of the soup-briquette "tunnel rat" in comparison to the legendary subterranean prowess of the rodent?
How will the Joint Eurolaser Rat-discourager find them?
By the tiny, tinny sound of the incidental music to The Great Escape coming from their little ratty iPod earbuds?
So it's a target differentiating point defense system in waiting? An automated munitions system (what we used to call 3rd generation mines before mines were banned - but then we though 'why not just change the name and go ahead as planned') just waiting for an upgrade to a lethal projectile system and they will be placed all over the agricultural areas of the EU.
The Maginot line 2.0?
They aren't even waiting for us to leave before investing in the EU defenses!
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2025
