Watch A Trained Drone-Hunting Eagle In Action

Drones are incredibly useful tools, in the right hands. In the wrong hands, though, they can make dangerous situations much worse. So, the Dutch national police are working on a green, intelligent solution to the problem that also happens to be completely awesome: They’re using trained eagles to take out dangerous drones.

As some drone operators have learned the hard way, eagles can put a drone in its place with ease. It’s thanks to their strong feet that can grip and carry heavy objects. Eagles have been seen in the wild taking down goats and going toe-to-toe with other dangerous predators. With the drone, it simply pulls it vertical, stopping the drone’s ability to fly, and carries it to a nearby ledge or its trainer. Eagles also have a few advantages over ground-based solutions, as an eagle snatching a drone isn’t going to slam a heavy object into a crowd of people, for example. It doesn’t even damage the drone.

That said, the rotors on drones might injure the eagles, so that challenge still needs to be addressed, possibly by creating custom eagle armor. They’ll also need to work out how the eagle will play an awesome metal solo as it plucks the drone out of the air, because come on. Using armored eagles to fight robots? That needs a metal solo.

(Via Engadget)

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