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October 9, 2009

Pigs Defeating RFID-Enabled Feeding Systems

Pretty clever (for a pig, that is).

EDITED TO ADD (10/10): Better link for video.

Posted on October 9, 2009 at 2:34 PM12 Comments

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Comments

Can you post a description? I am at work and the company filter says:

You cannot access the following Web address:
http://www.dumpert.nl/mediabase/653971/5b7b0636/...

The site you requested is blocked under the following categories: Nudity

Posted by: Don at October 9, 2009 3:29 PM


Pigs are actually pretty smart and clever animals. We had a farm while growing up that had pigs, one we called Houdini. No matter how we tried to keep him in the pen he would always get out to the food we kept farther away on the farm. We still dont know how he was getting out.

Posted by: JWalker at October 9, 2009 3:47 PM


@Don - it's the pink skin tones it's objecting to.

Posted by: Chris Bulow at October 9, 2009 3:47 PM


Pigs hate to wear the rfid tags, some wiggle out of the collars. Some other pigs have realized that you can take this fallen collar into the automated feeder and get a second meal.

Posted by: Warll at October 9, 2009 3:48 PM


Nudity... heh. Makes perfect sense since the pigs don't have any clothes on.

Posted by: Ken at October 9, 2009 3:50 PM


And pigs "use mirrors to find hidden food": http://feeds.wired.com/~r/wired/index/~3/...

Posted by: Chris Bulow at October 9, 2009 3:52 PM


Comparative tests have shown that pigs are at least as smart and possibly smarter than the smartest breeds of working dogs.

That's one reason that feral pigs in Australia are so hard to control.

Posted by: Godel_56 at October 9, 2009 4:32 PM


The same BBC video is on YouTube and may stream faster from there:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ImZmDYme_s

Posted by: Chuck at October 9, 2009 5:29 PM


With all of the nonsense that farmers do to farm animals why not just stick an rfid tag on their ear instead of some stupid collar.

Posted by: Frank at October 9, 2009 7:44 PM


Don: The site Dumpert is a general video site run by Dutch shock blog GeenStijl, and there is indeed nudity and rather explicit material on the site. So it's not a blocked video but a blocked site.

Posted by: Arnoud Engelfriet at October 10, 2009 3:19 AM


You'all should take the time to watch Jessica Holm's "Daylight Robbery" about squirrels and their prowess at figuring out ways of defeating attempts to stop them from stealing food.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?...
The fourth part features an obstacle course that the squirrel

Posted by: Paul Renault at October 11, 2009 7:24 AM


Sounds like the same problem in design that plagued the "Jurassic Park" dino-counting software - it looked for "at least N" dino instead of providing a real count. This feeder obviously was not built to detect 2 collars in the bin at the same time. 'Cause there's not way, you know, that the collars could possibly be, like, removed by the pigs.....

Posted by: Pete at October 11, 2009 10:46 AM


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