May 05 2009
Robot Shears Sheep
posted by Ana Samways at 9:24 amThis sheep was in its natural state, with no drugs to keep it comatose and still. In over 1000 tests with this robot shearing machine at the University of Western Australia, only a few sheep were seriously injured.
May 5th, 2009 at 10:42 am
Its a bit disturbing to see the sheep laid out like that and for over 5 minutes??? How many sheep can a human shear in 5 mins? This time I think the human way is more humane and quicker
May 5th, 2009 at 10:54 am
Wow. They’ve taken a routine task, complicated it excessively, terrified the animal and taken 5 times as long to shear the sheep. Genius…
May 5th, 2009 at 11:22 am
Thats 5 minutes, not including the portions of the video that were cut out, ( I’d guess at least another minute from there ) plus time to get the sheep in an out of the machine.
Apparently the creator considers it successful, because after it was demonstrated “Shearers have never aggressively increased their rates since the robot was shown in 1990, unlike 1973 and 1987 when rates went up by as much as 50% in one year.”
May 6th, 2009 at 7:23 am
What a ridiculous waste of time and money. It’s bad enough looking at one animal being put through this without thinking of all the ‘unsuccessful’ trials that would have come during development. Can someone stick these researchers on a boat and live-export them to Saudi Arabia?