
Well, they made life difficult for themselves by using AI looking for rats, it's very easy to detect if a mouse is plugged into a USB port...
One of the applications science fiction has found for AI is pest control – sometimes cute, sometimes extremely violent – and the direction of travel suggests we are moving into the realms of science fact. Last year The Register covered how engineering academics gave a laser beam machine vision and trained it to hunt …
The official app of New York (among many, many, many other cities).
There's going to be a great need for video cameras for this to work - and I hope those cameras operate via WiFi, because if they're connected via cables, well, let's just say that rats can handle that problem.
Though they will eat actual chilli flesh they don't like chilli sauce, like Tabasco or similar. Does stop them eating the cables. They seem to especially like black PVC. One ate through a slim dishwasher supply pipe. They ignore the regular fat hoses on washing machines and dishwashers.
Rodents - rats as well as mice - will try to eat almost anything they can sink their teeth into.
This is part of their evolutionary strategy: even though eating plastic doesn't nourish them or do them any good, and may even kill an individual, the point is they have _tried_. Don't knock it until you've tried it is really the point: if something new does turns out to be beneficial (e.g. there's some food _inside_ the plastic) then as a group they are onto it quickly. If they see one of their brothers suffer after eating something new: maybe they will even learn from that (this is speculation on my part, borne out of frustration with the success of rodents populating our house and garden)
Animal Intelligence is working fine, we have no rats or mice, or even cockroaches in the house - our cats work all day long and then sit on the sofa with me in the evening, not just the cats on the sofa, my crazy cat wife is happy there too!
Basically keep a cat around and you can ignore technology, technology doesn't purr so I am much happier with our cats. We live in Louisiana so cats are very helpful all the time, if there's a tornado close by at night then they run around and alert the whole family - it's never been a problem, the last tornado went past half a mile away but we were getting ourselves safe with the cats too.
we have no rats or mice, or even cockroaches in the house - our cats work all day long and then sit on the sofa with me in the evening
Ditto. Except for the whole 'cats working hard thing'. I think they've outsourced the work to a lower-class bidder (ie the dogs - two terrier crosses (one dachshund, one Spanish unknown mixture of breeds but mostly terrier) and one Romanian multi-breed cross that appears to hate rats and foxes so probably had some training in Romania before she got ill and ended up in the rescue centre..).
Old Mister Johnson had troubles of his own
He had a yellow rat that wouldn't leave his home
He used an AI system to track the rat that day
He saw the Rentokil man drive it very far away...
But the rat came back the very next day
The rat came back, they thought he was a goner
But the rat came back, it just wouldn't stay away
That's where I first heard it- I didn't realise it was a pre-existing (and much older) song in its own right until years later.
They also did a Hula Hoops advert based on the same animation.
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One other trick that has been tried is to get rats to ingest a contraceptive solution. This has been tried in New York with the effect of reducing the population of rats to a steadily-ageing population of non-breeding rats. Rats, as they age, tend to turn into aggressive, xenophobic curmudgeons which actively resist incursions from younger rats trying to move into their territories. The net effect is that you end up with a small resident population of rats which actively keep out incomer rats.
In a city like New York, no matter how zealous you are with the traps and poison you never eliminate the rat population, so reducing it to a tolerable low level is just as good as poison.