Kulning Cattle Manipulation

The Problem

Traditional cattle ranching has been the prominent problem between human and wildlife especially with apex predators such as jaguars in South America. The country is reporting Jaguar attacks which are known to attack livestock, and losses are hardest for small ranch owners. This leads to increasing conflicts between the feline predators and the local people and ranch owners. The current system for reporting wildlife conflict and protecting the cattle can be improved, however, due to low budgets of building up and maintaining an accurate system, the solution has to be as cost-efficient as possible.

Our Proposal

Our solution takes inspiration from kulning - an ancient Swedish herd calling technique. The song was used in the past and uses a high-pitched vocal technique, head tones, to communicate over long distances. We can deploy loud speakers inside a fenced area where cattle can be protected from predators when gathered within. By playing recordings of kulning at the end of the day to gather the cattle and let them out again in the morning we can avoid exposing them to the main predator, the jaguar, who primarily hunts during the night. Instead of a more common solution to deter predators such as jaguars and pumas from preying on the cattle as they are in proximity, we are shifting our focus onto manipulating their cattle’s movement at different times of the day to limit their exposure to potential predators and prevent hunts from before they happen. From an ethical point of view we aim to shift focus to manipulating the cattle movement with sound stimuli such as kulning is to allow control over their movement without using fear, such as using predator or human sound to direct cattle by activating their flight mode. Secondly, by having a farm and clearing out forests we are already disrupting the natural habitats of the predators and reducing the quantity of their prey. By focusing our effect to keep the cattle away from the predators we are preventing hunts while not disturbing the predators.

We Assume that...

Kulning has the same effects on cattle previously unexposed to the songs.

Kulning has the same effect being played on speakers as sung by a real person.

By playing randomized kulning songs sung by various voices we can mitigate habituation by the cattle.

We will be able to record high quality kulning by people who still know the technique.

There will be enough fundraising to provide speakers to all farmers in need.

When the speaker plays the recording - in order for the cattle to be curious they have to be in a relaxed state at the time the stimuli is played.

Constraints to Overcome

Currently some farmers have no boundaries for their cattle and therefore having just one speaker may not be enough to reach all cattle at once if they are too spread out. Multiple speakers maybe have to be connected by Bluetooth or each have a self-timer in order to play simultaneously. The cattle may have to be conditioned to hear the song and use their spatial recognition capability to return to the safe zone.

Current Work

Obtain recording of kulning and test the application with the cattle farms. More real world data is needed to confirm the effectiveness of the solution.

Current Needs

To learn the vocals and voices from the Swedish Kulning technique teachers and mentors need to be involved who can teach and support the local people at the beginning. A budget to cover these costs is therefore required. More investigation into this matter needs to be done to prove its effectiveness protecting the cattle with the Kulning technique. More speakers have to be installed eventually, depending on the space the cattle is spreading out. Fences to protect the rainforests and keep the cattle in a common area might be considered as well to improve the effectiveness of this vocal strategy.