Now it's hunting with drones

Friday, June 7, 2013

According to Modern Farmer magazine, based in Hudson, NY, hunters are using drones equipped with thermal imaging cameras to locate wild pigs and shoot them. A story featured Cy Brown and James Palmer, whom it described as "engineers and part-time airplane hobbyists in Louisiana who built what they call the 'dehogiflier.'" Palmer is described as "a crack shot" with a rifle equipped with a night vision scope that picks off the pigs after the drone locates them. The story says that, following some publicity in Time magazine in January, 20 farmers lined up to get the dehogiflier over their fields.

It's cheaper than a helicopter at $1,000 an hour and the drone camera can see a pig through a vegetative canopy where a helicopter can't. This development suggests that the war against wild pigs has escalated. Farmers hate them because pigs tear up soybean, corn and rice crops virtually unchecked throughout the growing season. "Pig hunting is a free-for-all in Louisiana," the story goes on to say.

Modern Farmer, which first published this year, bills itself as existing for the people who "make connections between what we eat, how we live, and the planet." BP