Dutch Police To Retire Drone-Catching Eagles Program

How does one take down a rogue drone flying in restricted areas without actually having to shoot it down? Over in Japan, this involves the use of drones equipped with nets to catch other drones, while in the Netherlands, they have opted to go with something more “organic” by deploying eagles trained to catch drones.

However it seems that about a year since the program’s announcement, the Dutch police have decided to retire the program. While it does sound like a rather interesting program, given that animals have mind of their own, one of the problems with the program is that sometimes the eagles don’t always do what they’re told.

This in turn raised the question that if these are problems that they’re already experiencing in tests, how would they fare in real-life situations in which it could potentially be more chaotic? There is also the issue of cost, where training raising these eagles from young do not come cheap.

Like we said, it did sound like an interesting program, especially when you compare it against the other more hi-tech solutions out there, not to mention it was more “natural” so to speak, but we guess it looks like the experiment proved to be a failure in the end.

Tyler Lee
Categories: Robots
Tags: Drones, Legal