There’s a headline you don’t read every day, right? And yet it’s no joke. A “modern pig herder” recently came up with the brilliant idea of transporting his pigs to the nearby slaughterhouse by drone. Loading them on trucks was both time-consuming and cumbersome, so he decided to strap his animals to a large remote-controlled drone and just fly them to the slaughterhouse. As you can imagine, his plan wasn’t exactly foolproof.
While attempting its maiden voyage to the slaughterhouse, the drone became entangled in high-voltage powerlines, which not only caused the poor pig hanging from it to remain suspended in the air for hours, but also cut the power to the entire village of
After attempting to detangle the drone, the farmer had no choice but to contact the power company and ask them to send professional help. It took 12 people over ten hours to restore power in the area, and the cost of the repairs was estimated at around 10,000 yuan ($1,400).
The farmer told the power company employees that he got the drone entangled in the power lines due to poor visibility. That didn’t get him off the hook, though, as a subsequent investigation found him guilty of flying a drone in a no-fly zone as well as overloading said drone.
The Sichuan farmer said that the mountainous terrain made transporting pigs by vehicle very difficult, and that the drone would have saved him a lot of time and money. Indeed, Chinese media reported that agricultural drones are increasingly used to transport live animals in mountainous areas across the country.
