A feral cat IoT army for misdirection: the invisible hand and national defence

OK, we’ve talked about Outdoor Kitty before. His relationship with me is directly the inverse of the temperature. Colder temperature == friendlier cat. Lately we’ve above zero temperatures so he’s not around much.

Now, one of the most frequent questions Sonya asks me is, ‘where does he go’, ‘can we attach a tracker to him’ etc. And I always respond, no, those tiny little infinite-battery-life satellite/gps trackers you see in movies are, well, in movies.

OK, slight switch of topics and then I’ll tie it together (promise). Recently a fitbit ratted out some US military operations. Seems many hard-working military folks wore it, it tracked their location, and reported home. And some big data found clusters of people where it was surprising.

So I get to thinking. What if we could incent people to humanely capture, de-flea, vaccinate, spay/neuter their friendly neighbourhood feral cats, and, give them a fitbit collar? We could fund it out of national defense budgets. What if we made this a foreign op, e.g. which ever country we are feuding with, we send some fancy-feast, some IoT collars to, and find the local animal lovers (who will for sure be on our side).

So we achieve multiple goals:

  • Feral cats are well fed, looked after
  • National Defense is achieved, the enemy will see our huge army, with lots of coverage, especially near dumpsters and heat-vents

What do you say? Make it happen?


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2 Responses to “A feral cat IoT army for misdirection: the invisible hand and national defence”

  1. Lee

    The Soviet Union tried using dogs to deliver anti-tank mines (one-way mission) back in WW2; it didn’t end well.
    For those interested: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-tank_dog
    Also: https://frinkiac.com/gif/S04E21/1241389/1247445/IFlFQUgsIEknVkUgQkVFTiBTVEFSVklORwogJ0VNLCBURUFTSU5HICdFTSBTSU5HSU5HCiBPRkYtS0VZLiAKKHNpbmdpbmcgb2ZmLWtleSk=

  2. db

    as long as there are no laser pointers, this army is invincible.

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