Tuesday, October 14, 2008

Kenyan Elephant sends text message

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Elephants in a particular part of Kenya have been raiding villagers' crops, causing some elephants (and farmers) to loose their lives and farm owners to loose out on up to six months worth of income. They try to fight the animals off, but they continue to come back. The Kenya Wildlife Service have already shot five elephants from the preservation who refused to stop crop-raiding. So the Save the Elephants Group came up with a plan. They placed a mobile SIM card in one of the the last surviving elephant-raiders, Kimani's collar. They set up a virtual "geofence" using a global positioning system that mirrored the preservation's boundaries. Whenever Kimani approaches the virtual fence, his collar sends a text message to the rangers letting them know he's coming.

After once being a nightly raider, the rangers have only intercepted Kimani 15 times since the project began.

Needless to say, the villagers, who rely on their crops for food and money to pay for school, are extremely happy with the outcome of the project.

2 comments:

Gizmo said...

awesome article! thanks for the link

A.Hugenkiss said...

What will they think of next!