The Elephant and the Cabbage

The Elephant and the Cabbage.

Did you know that farmers fields in Kenya are raided nightly by elephants?  The elephants eat the crops and ruin what’s left. It also ruins the livelihood of the farmers. Solve this problem.

Solution 1. Shoot the elephants?  No. These pachyderms are protected.

Solution 2. Guard your fields at night to scare off the raiders. No. This tires out the farmer, who then sleeps by day, and not farming.

Solution 3. Build a high sturdy wall around the field.  A non starter.  Too, too, too expensive.

Factoid. It happens that elephants greatly fear the sound of swarming honey bees, and run from it. 

Solution 4. Place a ring of bee hives around the crop fields separated but connected with trip wires to stir up the bees when breached by an elephant. It works!!  Also, this gives the farmers another crop. Honey.

Lesson. When the tiniest of things defeats the largest, this is something like a David and Goliath story.

Moral. To use intelligence to solve the impossible, you need to know your “chickens.”

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Have you noticed more and more home security devices are on the market? From home cameras to detect thieves, to security lights with cameras, to full security systems, devices are here in force. Is the reason increased home crime? Or has the public lost trust in their police to protect them from home crime?  Or perhaps these are merely the latest techie gadgets.