What an incredible world we live in if this system is cheaper to operate than owning a guard dog.

It's not difficult to argue that electronic systems are more efficient and less error-prone than any organic system, be it guard dog or human. In the future milk production may be replaced by machines by artificial synthetic production.

Electronic systems can be more efficient and less error-prone. But they can also be a lot worse, too. Organic systems are adaptive both through learning and selection, so at least in their areas of expertise they are usually still superior to all but the best electronic systems.

What I found more interesting than the SMS is the auto-release of a wolf-repelling chemical. The sheep gain a weapon of sorts, though not fired under conscious control. Sort of a cyborg-ish extension to the sheep's natural ability.

Sheep are a tremendous source of methane [1], I think we should patent a device which collects the methane and includes an ignition system that is triggered by metabolic symptoms of fear or distress. Combined with head tracking, the preferred embodiment would collect methane into a holding tank on the sheep's back. When the device detects sheep panic, it turns an exit nozzle for the tank toward the direction the sheep is looking, releases the stored methane while simultaneously applying an ignition source. This ignites the methane which converts it into heat, water, and CO2 which has a much lower impact on global warming. The resulting jet of fire not only discourages the wolf but through the effects of Newton's third law of motion causes the sheep to be rocketed away from the source of danger thus saving it from harm.

We will of course require new signage in the grazing area suggesting that people really really should not startle the sheep.

[1] http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123561039911777481.html

Quick, call the patent office!

I wonder how they tested it without causing a false alarm. Too many false alarms and people won't trust those alerts.

The sheep who cried wolf?

Get it right, the sheep who texted wolf. :-)

The fear might be shared when there are wolves around, so they might be analyzing more than 1 animal.

Oh man. Hook up a GPS unit and heart rate monitor to each sheep and you have a population model for how the knowledge of danger is spread within a group.

I'm literally salivating.

I also imagine you could run some kind of flocking algorithm on the GPS units (pun not intended), where if the sheep herd suddenly scattered you'd know something was up and how herd scattering occurs. Modern herd sheep are pretty stupid animals and scare easily, but with a big enough herd it takes quite a while to get them moving.

Hey can some one give some pointers where I can find such modules which would send the text message and can be interfaced with an arduino board to build a generic alarm system. I dont have any background in hacking arduino, but it seems for web enabling cool systems( fetch data and send control commands) the following is the easiest route:

sensor + actuator assembly__on__arduino<->sms_module<->AT&T_Jasper like_gateways<->my server

Probably my terminologies are wrong but hope you get the point.

One problem with this scheme is that areas where sheep are raised would probably have pretty sparse cellular coverage.

This is great! How long before shepherds start setting up twitter accounts for them?

Interesting and in some area's will add to the past-time of cow-tipping i suspect in the youth market, oh to be young.

Still, once we get scarecrows with lasers is when I know things are going too far.

I wonder if it would also warn of attacks by lonely shepherds.

TIL SMS stands for Sheep Monitoring System.

Phys.org? Really? There's not even a citation.

I would be curious to know where they got it from as well. Some preliminary searching doesn't turn up any solid info, but does turn up that the one person they quote by name, Jean-Marc Landry, previously worked on a project to reduce conflicts between shepherds and the reintroduction of wolves (http://www.kora.ch/en/proj/cdpnews/cdpnews001.htm#Landry), so it's plausible he'd be working on something like this.