I always try to be polite but there are times when I have to be blunt. In this case the man is a bloody moron and I hope someone looks into what he is doing toward the badgers in particular as a protected species.
The fact that these devices can cause harm to animals (just look online) does nothing but make him smile proudly for the BBC like a village idiot. We are in a war to try to protect and save wildlife -badgers are heading toward the Red List and foxes are declining rapidly and what does he do? He pulls out the usual idiot defence of "I'm protecting my children". And I had to just read the line about his device's use to ward of agriculture predators. What **** "agricultural predators"?
And what a shining example to his children -"If you don't like it then hurt it to scare it off!"
If the RSPCA are going to sit on their hands on this between biscuit dunking then maybe the local badger group needs to step up. We really have gotten to the point where this is tolerated and used as a "curio news item"
Shame on Mr Milward. Shame on the RSPCA.
A man got so fed up with foxes and badgers fouling in his garden that he adapted cameras to help repel them.
James Milward linked the Ring cameras at his Surrey home to a device that emits high frequency sounds.
He then trained the system using hundreds of images of the nocturnal nuisances so it learned to trigger the noise when it spotted them.
Mr Milward said it "sounds crazy" but the gadget he called the Furbinator 3000 has kept his garden clean.
Getting the camera system to understand what it was looking at was not straightforward though.
"At first it recognised the badger as an umbrella," he said. "I did some fine tuning and it came out as a sink, or a bear if I was lucky. Pretty much a spectacular failure."
He fed in pictures of the animals through an artificial intelligence process called machine learning and finally, the device worked.
The camera spotted a badger, and the high frequency sound went off to send the unwanted night-time visitor on its way and leave the garden clean for Mr Milward's children to play in.
But ultrasonic animal deterrents are not without controversy.
The RSPCA has long-objected to them, stating: "Noise levels produced by such ultrasonic devices are likely to be aversive to some animals, potentially causing them discomfort, fear and/or pain and predicting an individual's response is difficult."
Mr Milward said he "recognises the importance of living harmoniously with wildlife" but just wanted a humane way of protecting his two young children from the mess left by foxes and badgers, while also preserving his garden.
The IT expert said he thought the technology could have much wider applications than a back garden in the home counties.
"In agricultural settings there aren't really any safe deterrents for getting rid of potential predators, and this is an ideal solution for that," he said, adding that a similar system could be used anywhere where humans and animals come into conflict.
Mr Milward said he was not looking to profit from the Furbinator and instead has made his code open source.
While he may find a wider audience for the device, he admitted at home his wife did not quite share his zeal for his pet project.
"I think she's quite perplexed as to what I'm doing," he said. "But she's very much used to me going down these crazy paths to solve what would seem a very simple problem."
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