Defending My Animals From My Neighbor’s Cats

hey going cats are a massive problem in Australia there are 20 million of them and between them they manage to kill the population of Hawaii every single day in in native animals over time my yard has kind of become a paradise for animals in the area I have kookaburras eastern waters kinks pain tree frogs Magpies lorikeets possums Bush turkeys house lizards and this spider I kind of have a crush on so it was inevitable that over time word was gonna get out that my yard is a smorgasbord of tasty Australian animals and some hungry predators were going to show up at first I didn't know who was killing animals in my yard I just find a lizard tailed Heath and a clump feathers there but then I saw this point [Music] you know I like to think of myself as Noah and my yard as their Ark and I try to keep animals in good ratios but since the cats came around and animals have started to go missing everything is out of whack I have a frog that is so lonely he keeps trying to drown himself in my pool and then these kookaburras that used to be too happy separate couples have now become a polygamous threesome and I don't wanna have to explain what polygamy is to my younger siblings so I decided to create a robot in the deters cats from coming into my yard now don't get me wrong I like cats I think they have beautiful animals and I feel a bit bad for wetting and scaring them so let me try to explain why I feel that this is the appropriate thing to do with the help of T Zoo and shamelessly attempt to get more views cats were first brought into the Australian meta as a support class for humans back in the 1788 colonization patch cats have since moved away from their original human bosses and now inhabit the Australian bush they're ambush rogue playstyle is perfectly suited to deal with the native Australian builds and as a result cats became opie very quickly after being added to the server completely reshaping the Australian meta they are estimated to kill at least 16 native players at night and as a whole killed billions of native players every year they've also been responsible for removing at least 28 native mammal classes from the Australian meta forever and also spread diseases which massively nerfed the various native animal classes thanks TZ that was almost like you're here so in some areas of Australia this cat problem has gotten so out of control that people shoot poison and trap cats in an attempt to stop native populations from being wiped out so when I squirt the cat's in the face to stop them from being dickheads I'm actually doing them a favor and they are lucky that I'm not some bogey from South Australia that shoots them and turns them into a stubby holder to sell the tourists so let's go make this robot and I have no experience with making robots or coding but I do have experience with pretending I know how to code and make robots so I'm going in with a lot of confidence there was a lot more experience my hands are too big in there the why is it too small but I managed to come up with this so I have this Arduino board here which has a motion sensor when the motion sensor is triggered the Arduino magically tells the relay switch to complete the circuit telling this camera to take photos and at the same time it tells this servo to move down acting as a switch and letting water flow through the solenoid valve squirting water and whoever triggered the Arduino now I place the whole thing inside yogurt containers as my family it's a long yoghurt but if you do this it is extremely important you take the yogurt out of the container first now I've noticed that the cats usually stick to the perimeter of my yard so I decided that this gate here with a gap would be a good place to put the motion sensing squirt or robot so let's turn on the water and test out this trap using one of my patreon Thank You Chloe mo for your sacrifice and that worked great my feet are nice and cold and I also thought a good way of guaranteeing that the cats would enter here would be by placing some bait so I started to do some research into cat bait and I found this interesting story during a budget review of Australian national parks national parks staff got in trouble for spending hundreds of dollars on KFC using company credit cards and staff members were almost fired but then it turns out that KFC as it is extremely greasy and strongly aromatic is really good at attracting feral cats and staff members were actually using it as finger looking good bait to put inside their cat traps now I'm not sure if this is true or it's just a smart excuse from hungry national park staff but I thought using KFC would be a good place to start so let's leave that you can in the trap there and see what happens [Music] and after a while checked back and the chicken is gone and the ground is wet so it's a good sign so let's go and review the footage and it turns out the only thing retracted was Graham a staff member from New South Wales national parks you know this is what actually happened I stopped checking on the device at around 10 o'clock at night and went to sleep [Music] but then I was above woken up with constant ringing of my home phone at around 3 a.m. when I answered the phone he was my concerned neighbor who had woken up because of a loud noise that they suspected was a gas leak they looked outside their window and saw constant flashing which they thought was sparks my neighbors then became extremely scared that we had a gas leak and there was an electrical problem and they thought their families and mine were in danger of being killed in a gas explosion so they were desperately trying to call us to tell us to get out of the house but then I quickly explained to them that there was no danger and I was just making a device that squirts cats to stop them from eating animals in my yard because I'm sick of having polygamous kookaburras and when they heard this they agreed that polygamous kookaburras are a problem and they felt at ease and then we both went back to sleep so after checking out my robot in the morning I think the problem was this mechanical switch moved down and got stuck in the open position meaning that the water continued to spray and then the camera continued to take pictures creating a never-ending cycle of watering pictures made a couple of modifications to the design and the code and then I also sent the neighbors some earplugs and decided to try some different baits and different locations in my yard in this location here I managed to film good old Rattus Rattus munching down on some tuna and I also managed to capture this ominous shadow which freaked me out until I realized it was mine so then I decided to try the first location again at this time using something no one can resist it all peanut butter and in the morning I could tell it's being triggered and the ground was wet and there was actually a hair stuck to the peanut butter which is definitely a good sign so decided to review the footage and at first the camera was triggered by something maybe these ants but they're hosen go off yet as it only squirts if something blocks the path for 10 seconds and then this little cute guy showed up and as you can see he's pretty wary of the robot and is looking directly at it and then he disappeared and then he showed up again and then he disappeared again and then he showed up and was feeling quite comfortable and finally decided to go for the bait triggering the robot to spray the water unfortunately the camera didn't capture the exact moments the cat was sprayed only the moments before but it looks as though the water would have hit it directly in the face and I really really wish I'd captured the exact moment but I imagined it would have looked something like this and this definitely isn't a long-term solution and I don't think you'll prevent cats entirely from coming in my yard as they can just use another entrance and this isn't really a method you can use australia-wide but for the meantime this robot kind of puts the cats in their place and shows them that my yard ain't a free war you can eat smorgasbord and they might have to get a bit wet if they want to eat my animals [Music] thank you so much for watching if you liked that make sure to subscribe and check out my other stuff [Music]

Channel: I did a thing

Views: 388,840

Rating: 4.9316888 out of 5

Keywords: tierzoo, tier zoo cats, michael reeves, robot, william osman, william osman michael reeves, i did a thing, funny, arduino, satire, code, cat, hunting, crappy science, simone giertz, simone giertz william osman, a robot that squirts feral cats (ft. tierzoo), tierzoo humans, tierzoo water bear, cat (animal)

Id: HcSGd-5gRks

Length: 8min 58sec (538 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 12 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/xxbigphilxx]

Man, humans really ruined the ecosystem in Australia huh?

[u/Eziekel13]

Feral and free ranging domestic cats are the top human-caused threat to wildlife in the United States, killing an estimated 1.3 to 4 billion birds and 6.3 to 22.3 billion mammals annually - According to. Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cat_predation_on_wildlife

Also this has lead to a few extinct species ~30+ in AU alone. One such extinction, on the island of wren where one cat named Tibbles killed an entire species. Happened to be the closest living relative to the dodo bird...

It has gotten to the point in AU that the government are having to cull(kill) feral cats or pay people to do so...Vice on the subject

[u/viliamklein]

It's more fun to do explosively! https://youtu.be/goZ2DqMnaGc

[u/_Apostate_]

His robot is so ineffective that I have to think that this whole project is just contrived for the youtube video. The cat has to be stationary in front of the robot for ten seconds to get sprayed, but the camera flash trips instantly to startle animals away. If you are putting bait out in your yard to attract stray cats, doesn't that defeat the purpose of not wanting cats in your yard?

[u/HothHanSolo]

A reminder that strays and outdoor cats are, in fact, murder machines and lousy for local environments. Keep your cats indoors!

A 2013 study by Scott R. Loss and others of the Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service suggested that free-ranging domestic cats (mostly unowned) are the top human-caused threat to wildlife in the United States, killing an estimated 1.3 to 3.7 billion birds and 6.3 to 22.3 billion mammals annually.

[u/ASoberSchism]

Love the RuneScape music

[u/JoshBobJovi]

I watched this entire thing. At the end you're rewarded with a still image of a cat and the robot only being showed working on a foot with a cat drawn on it. This video could have been 2 minutes long.

[u/PM_me_song_mashups]

What a wonderful tribute to Runescape in the beginning

[u/skydiver1958]

I live in a city outside of Toronto Canada. I live on a main street but back onto a creek valley so a bit of wooded area. We have the opposite problem. Our cats aren't safe. We have foxes and the odd coyote and of course trash pandas.

Years ago I had a lot of neighbors that let their cats run free. Every once in a while there would be a missing cat poster. I would check the clump of hair by the creek and sure enough that was what was left of snowy the white cat.

Little girl 2 doors down lost her cat. I tried to tell her not to let it run free as it may have been eaten. It came back with a chunk missing a few days later. I once again explained the dangers of letting Mittens run free. The cat healed and she opened the door. That was the last she saw of Mittens. I have a cat free neighborhood. Partly because they get eaten and partly because it's a busy road so they get squished. I have 2 cats and they stay inside.

So ya we have the opposite. No cat is safe here.