Trapping Wild Hogs

State harneses power by using cellular network

• By Adam Cohen
• Apr 01, 2013

Helping the state of Tennessee with a solar-powered, IP video-based solution to catch wild hogs, ICRealtime has installed an autonomous remedy by harnessing the power of Verizon’s nationwide cellular network.

Wild hogs cause an estimated $1.5 billion annually nationwide in damages to agriculture, wildlife habitats and waterways. In addition, they carry diseases harmful to livestock, other animals and humans.

The Tennessee Wildlife Resources Agency (TWRA) has the daunting task of controlling the wild hog population. An initial, informal return-oninvestment study revealed that the state pays thousands of dollars per year, mostly in man-hours, trapping and dispatching these hogs.

Most of the hours are spent attempting to learn the hogs’ feeding patterns by reviewing amateur snapshots taken by TWRA staff. The inexpensive, standalone cameras record only still pictures on an SD card and offer no live viewing.

This requires someone to travel to each site to retrieve pictures and replace camera batteries, or the cameras would fail and miss vital trending information. Additionally, scores of painstaking hours are spent reviewing images to establish when the hogs gather to feed inside a trap.

Once a pattern is determined, two officers schedule the best time to wait for hours in a tree stand for the hogs to return to the trap. Using a watchful eye and a keychain-sized remote control, they hit a button to trap as many hogs as they can.

IC Realtime’s innovative M2M solution acts as a digital force multiplier to increase the officers’ productivity by enabling them to be in two places at once. After deployment, these systems keep a watchful eye 24/7 on each trap.

The system records the movement in HD, then sends out snapshots of all of the action, instantly alerting the officer, who can be offsite conducting other duties for the state.

These systems can be customized to work in virtually any environment. They monitor themselves and automatically send out system health status reports, such as solar power wattage, battery voltage, charging capacity and temperature.

The system is built with self-correcting mechanisms to power down and recharge when sunshine is lacking. The cameras additionally send out alerts if any abnormalities occur.

The ICmyLIFE Portal allows these remote systems to send video and alerts to the cloud from long-term storage, further reducing costs by limiting the amount of video storage devices needed to be deployed onsite. This M2M cloud-based platform provides live video on demand without special software needs, or requiring staff to remember IP addresses and passwords.

Features such as instant time-lapse playback, advanced calendar searching, event-based notifications and digital output controls for switches, relays and lights help customers save money, one click at a time.

This article originally appeared in the April 2013 issue of Security Today.