To stop marauding hungry bears from attacking people, scary robot wolves are being deployed in Hokkaido
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It’s a story that should be a fairytale: Robot wolves are being used to scare hungry bears away from Japanese towns and villages.
As the eternal villain of many a fairy tale and the scrouge of many a sheep farmer, the wolf has a poor reputation both in the storybooks and in real life. So, imagine a real-life story in which the wolf is actually the good guy who saves a village from the wrath of that other fairy tale bad boy, the bear. Well, on the Japanese island of Hokkaido, wolves have indeed become the heroes of the story. Robot wolves that is.
There are two kinds of bear in Japan, the smaller and less aggressive black bear and the much grumpier and more dangerous brown bear. Hokkaido Island is home to a large and increasing population of brown bears (there’s an estimated 12,000 brown bears on the island), and over the past sixty years, there have been 150 recorded bear attacks on humans on Hokkaido Island. In 2021 alone, four people lost their lives to bears on the island, and ten were injured.
The bears are drawn ever closer to urban areas for two reasons. In the past few decades, Japan has become increasingly urbanised and as the villages have emptied so the buffer zones between city and countryside has faded, which has brought wildlife closer to towns.
In the case of the brown bear, another reason it has started to move closer to urban areas is to do with acorns. Before the bears go into a deep winter hibernation, they fatten up on autumn acorns, but a recent run of poor acorn harvests, which experts believe is caused partially by climate change, has meant that the bears have had to look elsewhere for alternative food sources. And in the towns, there’s always something for a bear to eat.
A couple of years ago, in the small Hokkaido town of Takikawa, the authorities came up with an unusual way of trying to deter the bears: giant robot wolves! The ‘wolves’ work by using sensors that detect any movement. As soon as something alerts its sensors, the wolf springs to life, its eyes glow red, it moves around and it lets out a bloodcurdling cacophony of loud sounds.
Up until now, rural communities and hill farmers all around the world have relied on a of mix electric fencing, large guard dogs and loud noises to deter bears, but when the first two robot wolves were put into action in 2020, they very quickly proved their worth with zero human-bear encounters recorded in the first two months after installation.
The effectiveness of the robot wolves, which Japanese researchers believe can deter bears from approaching within one square kilometre, means that many more local authorities in Japan have ordered the robots, which are being used not just as bear deterrents but also to keep deer, wild boar and other creatures off crops.
So, who’s scared of the big bad wolf? Well, it seems the big bad bear is!
