This cow-saving tactic might make you howl with laughter.
The United States Department of Agriculture is using audio of actors Scarlett Johansson and Adam Driver to scare off wolves, The Wall Street Journal reported last week.
In the wildly amusing report, the outlet explained that gray wolves in the American West are wreaking havoc on livestock.
“It’s basically like driving through Burger King, easy pickings for them,” Mary Rickert, the owner of Prather Ranch in Northern California, told the Journal.
Although Rickert has lost as many as 40 calves to the carnivores, she can’t just go John Wick on them. The wolves are endangered — which means it’s illegal to harm them.
But the USDA has come up with a pretty creative way to keep herds of sheep and cattle from becoming a pack’s all-you-can-eat buffet.
Essentially, the agency is using drones equipped with spotlights, loudspeakers and “thermal cameras that can reveal any wolf lurking in the darkness.”
When the flying bot spots a wolf near a rancher’s animals, it uses the light and the loudspeaker to scare it back into the woods.
Some of the recordings played on the drones’ loudspeakers make logical sense — like loud fireworks or gunshots. But others are just straight-up silly, and include AC/DC’s “Thunderstuck” and the explosive fight between Johansson’s and Driver’s characters in Noah Baumbach’s 2019 film, “Marriage Story.”
“I need the wolves to respond and know that, hey, humans are bad,” a USDA district supervisor (who is totally a human and not a canine) named Paul Wolf told the Journal.
As goofy as this all sounds, the Journal says the recordings seem to be working.
The outlet reports that drones were deployed to an area in Oregon where “11 cows were killed by wolves there in a 20-day period.” After 85 days of the drones’ booming recordings — which hopefully included Johansson screeching, “You gaslighted me; you’re a fucking villain!” and Driver yelling, “I was hot shit and I wanted to fuck everybody, but I didn’t!” — only two cows were killed.
Although the idea of using a movie scene to scare off wild animals is a bit goofy, the fight scene in “Marriage Story” displays raw human emotions, and Johansson and Driver did deliver intense performances.
“They’ve lost their voices; they’ve lost a sense of who they are,” Baumbach described the scene to Entertainment Weekly in 2019. “They’re trying to figure out what they believe anymore. And that’s a dangerous place, I think, for a couple to find themselves.”
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