I want to love the Monster Wolf idea and the Wacky Inflatable Tube man idea as deterrents but I have my reservations (a thread). Most of these deterrents are often hailed as a innovation but the truth is somewhat more complex. The idea behind deterrents is to keep animals (1/?)

..wary of their environment and to disrupt the ongoing intended behavior. By deploying deterrents you are taping into an animal's self-preservation instinct and essentially making it riskier for that animal to follow through with it's intended behavior. For example...

... a coyote approaching a known livestock area with the intent to investigate the area and possibly take a lamb. By placing a deterrent you are making it riskier for the coyote since it has to weigh its options. Do I try and get a lamb and potentially risk running into a human..

....or do I try and find prey somewhere else that's safer? That's essentially what you are trying to do with deterrents. Now it's critical to constantly change deterrents because once an animal learns that this stimulus (fox lights, fladry etc) means it no harm its game over...

...and the self preservation instinct is gone. Now the problem with Monster Wolf and Wacky Inflatable Tube Man is that they often have a predictable pattern. A set of moves and noises programmed into them. They are also usually not moved around the area. This predictability...

...makes it easier for the predators to habituate to the stimuli and therefore pay no heed to it in a few months. The underlining danger is that these tools are viewed as innovative and since they work initially, follow-up tends to be slow if present at all and humans....

...settle in a false sense of safety that this is the "silver bullet". If deterrents aren't switched around predators will become habituated to them and it will take a long time before the particular deterrent actually works well again. So whilst I like the idea I am also wary...

...that it might lull people into a false sense of security and stop being effective after a few months. Happy to be proven wrong however and as technology advances, we can probably program some robots to provide different stimuli and be constantly ever changing.