Sunday, February 05, 2023

"Corvid Cleaning" takes off in Sweden

Here's a smart idea from - where else? - Sweden. Crows are being trained to pick up litter in the form of cigarette butts (which apparently represents an amazing 62% of total litter), and deposit them in an automated container in exchange for food pellets. This reduces the cost of picking up cigarette butts from 12c per butt (using human labour) to 3c (using crows).

It's not a new idea, though. The Puy de Fou theme park in western France started training rooks to pick up litter back in 2018.

Crows are smart enough to learn the skill (and even teach it to upcoming generations of crows). Although, as one person commented, if crows are smart enough to learn to pick up butts, but humans are apparently not smart enough not to drop them in the first place, what does that say about us?

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