I remember when I was a little puppy suckling on my mommy. She would teach me while I drank her milk.
“Little Ayla,” she would say, “remember all anipals talk. You will talk one day, too.” She would lick my little head. “But your human will have to tweet for you. It is a sad truth that only the opposable-thumb creatures can tweet.”
As she said that, a tear would fall from her eye and bounce off my head.
It stands to reason that I would be totally unprepared to learn that cows can tweet…all by themselves…almost without thumber intervention.
@FreerideSpeedy
Meet my friend @FreerideSpeedy. She wakes up every morning on a dairy farm a few miles southwest of Toronto. The first thing she does is let the twitterverse know she is awake by waxing poetic (She is very intelligent!): Liker bull-faced she, And tall-limbed wholly, And with tip of tail, Brushing her footsteps as she walks along.
She takes care of her natural urges, then ambles toward the robot milking machine which offers her food for milk. This morning, she let the world know, “Gave 11.9 kgs of milk and got my 1584 grams of daily food to keep me producing well.” She added with a wink, “Fastest teat is my right front which milked in 2:37 secs.”
@FreerideSpeedy ends her working morning with a nod to future productivity, “More copious soon the teat-pressed torrents flow.”
Freeride and 11 of her sister cows tweet their happy, automated lives every day. They all wear remote tracking devices called RFID chips. As the cows interact with the robot milker or robot back-scratcher (really!), the chip posts the information (or poetry or philosophical reflections) to Twitter. Of course, humans write the messages (darn it!), but after that all the Twitter updates are automatically generated.
The RFID devices have proven so successful with dairy farming, a tweeting chip is currently being developed for cats! Any of you kitties want to tweet automatically every time you visit your litterbox?
If you would like more information about the tweeting cow project, TEAT TWEETS, and RFID devices, go to http://teattweet.net .
The TEAT TWEET story has been covered extensively by the Canadian press at Food and Farming Canada, The Windsor Star , The Record , and The National Post . The Internet tech magazine, Mashable, also covered this story.
{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
Geesh – what won’t they think of creating next! You write an amazing article Ayla – very gifted writer.
Had to fallow her. That is so cool! Even says how much she has eaten. Totally cool ariticle.