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recycling pig
train porkers to find recyclable material on refuse tips. | |
Pigs like muck. Give a pig a nice field and it'll wallow in the muckiest bit or dig up the rest of it in a search for morsels. For this task they have evolved shovel-like snouts and a keen sense of smell. Pigs are also highly intelligent and enjoy puzzles, they can be trained to do dog-like tasks, especially
if there is a food reward.
There are kids in Sao Paulo living in tin shacks that scavenge the rubbish tips for aluminium cans. There are millions of idle pigs in Denmark living in tin shacks who only have a boring field to dig around in with little chance of finding anything other than the gruel they're given.
Recycling much of the waste we create today is sadly not yet economically viable, recycling existing waste is even less so. Until we develop robots that sort the waste for us it will always be cheaper to chuck some stuff away. You know what's coming: Train pigs to sniff out metals, plastics(perhaps even different types) and other recyclable materials, perhaps they can even pick out materials like glass by touch. Then let them live on a dump. It might be best to give them a new layer of old rubbish every few weeks so that they don't have to dig too deep and there isn't too much edible stuff that would distract them from their reward; which would of course be food. You could even have QA pigs that would dig around in, say, the black polyproplylene collecting pigs' bin for anything that wasn't black polypropylene (Okay, thats too silly).
Free yet fulfilling labour mining valuable resources on waste land for the price of pigswill. Thats gotta be a great business plan. If I could train pigs I'd damn well do it myself. Question: Is $pigtraining >/=$sscrap(+$fitterhappierpig+$landuse)?
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Train people to seek out fishbones. There, you found one. |
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