The Thanksgiving holiday is here and with it comes our annual news update on
turkey robots. MIT's Spring
Turkey biped is still the most advanced turkey robot around, even if
it is getting a bit old. But for the most realistic appearance and
behavior, we'd have to go with Custom Robotic Wildlife's
robot Turkey. The
Turkey is autonomous and has interchangable skins; just the thing to
assist hunters in killing biological turkeys (and game wardens trying
to stop
hunters from killing the live turkeys)
The hunters shoot the 1,000+ turkey robot.
Those turkeys are expensive and I don't think they'll be able to
recoup much of the cost and effort from nuyingand maintaining them.
Most park budgets have little or no money already.
I remember someone had made up some simple silouette deer targets,
placed them near roads. Idiot hunters would stop and shoot the deer
target and then the rangers and or police would swoop in and arrest
them. The hunters seem to have become a lot less intelligent nowadays.
That "buck fever" is a lot worse now than it was 20-30 years ago.
This is how intelligent some hunters were back then:
A farmer, in Pennsylvania I think, painted the word "COW" on both
sides of a milk cow to keep deer hunters from shooting at it.
The cow was shot in spite of this precaution, possibly because a
hunter thought a deer was trying to pass as a cow.
Another hunter wearing a dayglo orange jumpsuit climbed a tree to
wait for a deer to pass by and was shot by someone that thought
he was a turkey.
Another hunter was apparently killed while he was relieving
himself near a barb wire fence during a thunderstorm.
Nobody saw this happen, but he was found dead with his pants
unzipped and an exposed body part that had been "cooked."