Beeping Till the Cows Come Home
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TOKYO — The beep of a pocket pager usually sends a doctor, a busy executive or even a drug dealer scurrying to a telephone for an important message. But in southwestern Japan, beepers are calling cows to their chow.
A Japanese rancher is herding his cattle by equipping them with pocket pagers. And it seems to be working.
A handful of cows undergoing special training at the Shimane Prefectural Animal Husbandry Experiment Station are learning to stop grazing and head to their feeding area when the beepers dangling from their necks go off.
The Shimane experiment is part of a government-funded project to test the impact of sound on cows in an effort to develop labor-saving herding methods.
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