This is a unique cat flap (door) designed by an Amazon engineer, which uses artificial intelligence to detect when a cat is trying to enter the cat flap with prey in his or her mouth. If it does detect prey it donates a sum of money to a US bird charity (National Audubon Society)! That’s very cool. In addition it locks itself to prevent the cat entering the home with prey in his mouth and at the same time texts a picture of the owner’s cat and prey to his smart phone.
Now, I think that’s a very cool piece of engineering. The guy who did it is Ben Hamm. He admits that he is a techy wizard of a crazy cat lady, male version! This cat’s name is Metric and he is a pitiless unrelenting serial killer of wildlife (Ben Hamm’s description). Some cats are like that while others are not. He has a habit of bringing in prey at 3 AM in the morning and sometimes when Mr Hamm is in the middle of having sex with his partner. This has brought sex to an immediate and abrupt end!
Mr Hamm used more than 23,000 images to develop the algorithm. It locks his cat out of the home for 15 minutes. I suppose that gives him time to eat his prey outside. Metric brings in prey (one animal) every 10 nights on average. That’s similar to my cat although on occasions my cat brings in prey two times in one night and it is at about 3 AM in the morning.
My cat eats his prey sometimes entirely and he always does it quickly. If he leaves something it is the gallbladder. He struggles with birds leaving most of the animal. It must be the feathers. Sometimes however he does eat the entire bird. Some wild cat species pluck the feathers of birds before they eat them. My cat doesn’t.
P.S. The National Audubon Society spread fake news about cat predation so I dislike them! Specifically they constantly rely on small scale studies to criticise cat predation by saying how destructive it is to wildlife while ignoring wildlife destruction on a much larger scale by people.
