South Africa Drones For Anti-Rhino-Poaching Patrol 96
garymortimer writes "The SA National Defence Force is considering using an unmanned drone helicopter to target rhino poachers, Defence Minister Lindiwe Sisulu said yesterday. She told a press conference in Pretoria she wanted state weapons company Denel to further develop an unmanned aerial vehicle it was working on so it could be used to help SA National Parks catch rhino poachers."
Re:Boers, with muskets ... (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm a descendant of those boers. Trust me - it's not like that anymore.
Very much like the average person living in Lincoln County today cannot draw, fire and actually hit a target in under 4 seconds anymore. It was a survival skill for my ancestors a hundred years ago, that skill was why roughly 500 men could defeat a conservatively estimated 10000 men at the battle of blood river (granted there were several other force multipliers that they used - their enemies had short-range spears [Assegai is really a sort of intermediary design between a spear and a sword] rather than guns, they had an excellent location that prevented all the enemy forces from striking at once, the weather was hugely in their favor), some 70 years after that their grandchildren gave Britain hell in a war for 3 years that was ultimately only won by ultimately killing 27 thousand women and children.
After the war though, the vast majority of their children moved to cities and towns, the great shooting skill of my ancestors died out within two generations.
My great-grandfather could hit a thumbprint at 500m through open-sights in real-world conditions (so could just about everybody he knew of course), my grandfather could just about hit a beer can at that range, my dad will probably hit somewhere in target (but he is an ex-cop).
Most of the generation of us today have fathers who still go hunting now and then - but the vast majority of us have never actually fired a gun. I don't own one, and feel no need to - and I am actually a good shot. My sister and I both won colors doing sport-shooting in school. She was the rifle expert, I preferred pistols.
Neither of us have ever shot a weapon at any living thing however, neither of us have fired a gun in at least 10 years, we've never done so without supervision. As adults, once we no longer did the sport - our interest waned. And most of our schoolmates didn't do the same sport, many of them own pistols but most of them have never even touched a rifle.
We're still a gun-crazy country (almost as bad as America really) - in part because of that history and the fact that our parents were still draughted in the bush-war - but the fact is, the old Boers who could live off the land for weeks at a time, never-ever missed a shot (because bullets were expensive and scarce), and could hit a moving the size of a rabit from a horse in gallop just don't exist anymore. Our field-rangers in the parks are probably the closest to that which still survives - and it's clearly not enough or we wouldn't be looking at this sort of technology. Those of us who still farm are the last ones you should look at, they are by-and-large the most obese population group in the country.
Sadly, your documentary sounds fairly accurate - but it's about as applicable to modern-day industrialized Afrikaans culture as a documentary on Billie the Kid is to the typical modern American.
At last! (Score:3, Interesting)