Can police use eagles to pluck hostile drones out of sky?
Dutch police have been working with a company that trains birds of prey to test whether eagles can use their powerful talons to take down drones.
Dutch police have been working with a company that trains birds of prey to test whether eagles can use their powerful talons to take down drones.
Sometimes a low-tech solution is the best option to treat to a high-tech problem. That鈥檚 what Dutch company Guard from Above is banking on, as it turns to nature to help police snatch potentially hostile drones out of the sky.
In a video released Sunday, the company shows how it trains eagles, highly skilled predators, to grab flying drones with their powerful talons and instinctively drop them in a safe place, away from other birds or people. In exchange for intercepting flying objects they can鈥檛 eat, the eagles are rewarded with food that is more appetizing than an unmanned aerial vehicle, reports IEEE Spectrum.
One of the company鈥檚 first customers is the Dutch National Police, which is testing the eagle option along with more high-tech solutions to聽remove drones from areas where they are banned: above large events or near airports, as the Associated Press reported.
鈥淓veryone can get hold of a drone, and that includes people who want to misuse them,鈥� police spokesman Michel Baeten told a Dutch news program.
鈥淚t is a multifunctional piece of equipment and that means you can launch an attack with them as well,鈥� he said.
Drones are controlled remotely from the ground and have many useful applications, such as surveying damage after a disaster, monitoring illegal whaling, or taking aerial photos of ancient ruins for archaeologists. But they can also can be armed to assassinate, equipped to spy, or physically interfere with聽emergency responders or aviation traffic.
Larger drones have been used by the US and other military for several years in areas where manned flight is too risky or difficult, and to carry out targeted killings. And now the popularity of smaller drones among recreational users is surging. The Consumer Technology Association, an Arlington, Va.-based technology business association, projected that 700,000 drones were sold in the US alone last year, a 63 percent increase from 2014.
As 海角大神鈥檚 editorial board wrote last year:
While governments around the world grapple with how to regulate consumer drones, it鈥檚 no wonder that Dutch police are looking into creative solutions for dealing with possible threats to public safety.
As Guard from Above said in a press announcement, 鈥淪ometimes the solution to a hypermodern problem is more obvious than you might think.鈥�
Indeed, untrained hawks have already proven they can handle drones, 海角大神 reported in 2014.