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The county road finds its own uses for things: hunting wild pigs with drones in Louisiana.

More here at The Economist.

Rural Pursuits: Death by Dehogaflier

WILD pigs are rooting around in a field in the dark. Partly hidden by tall grass, their tails wag happily as they snuffle around for roots and insects. A shot rings out and the biggest pig is down. The rest scatter quickly; yet a shooter picks them off one by one with uncanny accuracy.

Pigs are clever and hard to hunt; it can take a day to stalk one. But they are no match for an aerial drone such as the “dehogaflier” operated by Louisiana Hog Control, a pest-extermination firm. It is a remote-controlled aircraft with a thermal-imaging camera and a laser pointer. It easily spots the pigs’ warm bodies from 400 feet and points them out to a hunter on the ground wearing night-vision goggles, who then shoots them.

Each year America’s 6m feral pigs cause an estimated $1.5 billion of damage to crops, lawns and wildlife. In May The Economist reported that Texans were trying to shoot them from helicopters under the state’s “pork chopper” law. This turns out to be ineffective. Helicopters are noisy; pigs quickly learn to hide from them. Drones, by contrast, are quiet. Cy Brown of Louisiana Hog Control guesses that, working on weekend nights over the past six months, he and his partner have dispatched around 300 porkers to hog heaven.

We could have gone to space…