It’s a viral-video disaster waiting to happen. Taser, manufacturer of the iconic stun gun, is taking aim at out-of-control animals. Marauding moose headed your way? Angry bear eyeing your picnic basket? You can tase him, bro.Taser’s X3 is no longer just for shocking your editor. But unlike the model used on humans, Taser’sWildlife Electric Control Device — a bulky device that looks a bit like a bright red nail gun — shoots more than one electric “Neuro Muscular Incapacitation” pulse at a time. Up to three cartridges can fire at one animal, sending up to 20,000 volts through Boo Boo from 35 feet away.
The Register’s Lewis Page reports that the Wildlife had its public debut at the SHOT Show gun expo in Las Vegas this week. But don’t think of the Wildlife as a method for wantonly shocking woodland creatures. Taser CEO Rick Smith tells Page that the point of the Wildlife is to give animal-control experts a safe tool to “help resolve human-animal conflicts.”
There’s even science to back it up. Four different stun guns were tested on brown bears at the Yakutat, Alaska landfill as a kind of proof-of-concept for the Wildlife. According to research conducted in part by the Alaska Department of Fish and Game and posted to Taser’s website, it turns out you don’t want to encounter a bear with the XREP electric shotgun cartridge, since it won’t incapacitate him. For pre-Wildlife products tested, only the Shockwave managed to zap a bear sufficiently so she didn’t return to the landfill the following day. Though in fairness, the other three guns made the bears “leave dump,” a poster summarizing the research suggests, and we presume that means vacating Yakutat and not anything else you might be thinking. None of the bears appear to have suffered any lasting damage.
That follows a 2009 case of Oregon law-enforcement officials tasing an elk in order to free it from a barbed-wire fence that ensared its antlers. There was also that time Welsh policemen tased a runaway sheep.
Now begins the great animal-Taser debate, as Page suggests: will animal-ready tasing amount to a more humane way of stopping out-of-control animals than shooting them? Or will it lead people to needlessly tase the creatures, out of the callous assumption that they won’t be harmed? Either way, here’s hoping people at least have the decency to keep any animal/Taser interactions off of YouTube.
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