A physical fence excludes everything that meets it. A virtual fence excludes only the animals carrying collars — everything else in the landscape moves through the line as though it were not there. In a landscape whose conservation target includes a migrating reptile, that is the whole reason to prefer coordinates over wire.
Nineteen stops in four moves: the wire, the collar, the learning, and the two properties that follow from it. Click a stop — where a transition has a clip it plays and lands on the next frame, and the labels appear once the picture is still.
Open ground
NO IMAGE IN THIS FILM IS A PHOTOGRAPH. Every frame is generated. The pasture is generic — no Galápagos location or vegetation is depicted. The tortoise stands for what an uncollared animal is; it is not a filmed Galápagos scene. The hardware is drawn generically and no manufacturer is named or shown.
A boundary is drawn in software as a set of coordinates. Each animal wears a GPS collar that knows where it is relative to that line. There is nothing in the ground and nothing in the air.
As the animal approaches, the collar plays a tone that rises in pitch. If the animal keeps going past the line, a brief electrical pulse follows. The pairing is the whole technology. The animal is not learning a map — it is learning that the tone predicts the pulse. Once that association forms, it turns at the sound, and the pulse becomes rare.
Because it is learned rather than built, three things follow. It needs a training period. Animals that have met an electric fence before learn faster. And it is not restraint: an animal that is determined, or frightened, can walk through.
Two further things follow from the boundary being software rather than structure. It can be moved without dismantling or building anything, so a grazing cell is relocated on the cadence the vegetation requires rather than the cadence fence-building allows. And the management goal it serves is suppression of regrowth by grazing — without herbicide.
The boundary is a polygon held in software. Collar position is resolved by GNSS and compared against that polygon; the containment behaviour is generated on the animal, at the collar.
The stimulus pair is an escalating audio cue on approach and, on continued transgression, a brief electrical pulse. Containment is therefore a conditioned avoidance response — a Pavlovian association between the auditory conditioned stimulus and the aversive unconditioned stimulus — and not a physical barrier. Pulse frequency is expected to fall as the association consolidates, which makes pulse rate per animal per day the natural index of learning rather than of containment failure.
Manufacturer specification gives a minimum one-week training period and a minimum group size of five animals. Prior electric-fence experience shortens acquisition in heifers. None of this has been verified by this project under equatorial conditions.
Because the boundary is a polygon and not a structure, cell geometry and position are decision variables on the vegetation’s timescale rather than on a construction timescale. The management objective is suppression of regrowth by grazing pressure, with no herbicide input.
It does not remove established plants; grazing manages regrowth. It does not work on an untrained animal, and it does not restrain one. And it does not target Rubus niveus in the first phase. The first-phase target vegetation is Pennisetum purpureum — elephant grass — chosen because its palatability is not in question, which takes one behavioural assumption off the critical path. Suppression of R. niveus is the objective of the programme, not of the first cells.
Not GHRI data: no pulse rate, boundary interaction or containment outcome has been measured by this project.
ESTABLISHED ELSEWHERE
UNTESTED HERE
PILOT IN PREPARATION
Pilot project in preparation, on private agricultural land in the Santa Cruz highlands. Regulatory consultations with the competent agencies have not yet been submitted. No equipment has been deployed in the field.
The collars are a commercial system built by a third party. GHRI would buy or borrow hardware and run a pilot on private land; it does not speak for the manufacturer, and the manufacturer does not speak for it.
The grazing is a management tool, not a product. Nothing in this track produces anything to sell.