Comments on: Robot Shears Sheep

By: Kate

Kate — Tue, 05 May 2009 19:23:36 +0000

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?

By: Bruce

Bruce — Mon, 04 May 2009 23:22:42 +0000

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.”

By: Damian

Damian — Mon, 04 May 2009 22:54:16 +0000

Wow. They’ve taken a routine task, complicated it excessively, terrified the animal and taken 5 times as long to shear the sheep. Genius…

By: Julie

Julie — Mon, 04 May 2009 22:42:08 +0000

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