masterwordsmith-unplugged

This morning, I came across an eye-opening article by John Tagliabue in The New York Times about how Swiss cows can text owners from smartphones to announce they are in heat. The detector fixed to the cow's neck has a SIM card so that the owner can pay for the calls. A joke? Nope. Consider the following excerpt:

 Swiss Cows Send Texts to Announce They’re in Heat
by John Tagliabue


 When Christian Oesch was a boy on his family’s hog farm, cellphones were a thing of the future. Now, Mr. Oesch tends a herd of dairy cattle and carries a smartphone wherever he goes. Occasionally he gets an SMS from one of his cows.



That is because Mr. Oesch, 60, who cares for a herd of 44 Red Holstein and Jersey dairy cows, is helping to test a device that implants sensors in cows to let farmers know when they are in heat. When that is the case, the device sends an SMS to the farmer’s phone. The Swiss do not settle for half measures: the SMS can be in any one of Switzerland’s three main languages — German, French and Italian — plus English or Spanish.

If there is anything to be learned from this project, which will bring the devices to market early next year, it is that Heidi’s world of goats — or cows — placidly grazing in Alpine meadows is gradually becoming the stuff of storybooks.

The electronic heat detector is the brainchild of several professors at a technical college in the nearby Swiss capital of Bern. It fills a market gap, they say, because dairy cows, under growing stress to produce larger quantities of milk, are showing fewer and fewer signs of heat. That makes it harder for Swiss farmers to use traditional visual inspections to know when to bring on the bull or, in about 80 percent of the cases these days, the artificial inseminator.

The sensor implanted in the genitals of Fiona or Bella (favorite names for Swiss cows) measures body heat, then transmits the result to a sensor affixed to the cow’s neck that measures body motion. (Cows in heat become restless.) “The results are combined, using algorithms, and if the cow is in heat an SMS is sent to the farmer,” said Claude Brielmann, a computer specialist who helped design the system. The detector on the cow’s neck is equipped with a SIM card so the farmer can pay for the calls.

“Our recognition rate is about 90 percent,” Mr. Brielmann said.

The device, known as a heat detector, raises concerns among animal rights advocates, not so much because of its intrusiveness in the private parts of the cow — its use involves inserting a thermometer with a tiny transmitter and antenna in the cow’s genitals — but because of what it says about the stressful lives of Swiss cows. It also prompts skepticism among dairy farmers, who are startled by its cost, which is expected to be at least $1,400 per unit. 

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