Virtual fencing research considers ear tags for sheep

CSIRO senior research scientist Dana Campbell has been involved in the trials around virtual fencing since 2014, which started through a partnership between the CSIRO and a commercial company.

The collars were automated and operated through GPS signals, she said.

They worked by making an audiotone when the animal came close to the boundary, which was followed by an electric pulse.

Dr Campbell said there were numerous trials carried out to determine the appropriate level of pulse and to make sure the animals were not harmed.

"We did individual testing of animals, administering different strengths of the electric pulses and looking specifically at what did that animal do when it received a pulse of that particular strength," she said.

"If you had a pulse that's too weak the animals aren't going to respond to it, if it's too strong, you're going to get too strong a reaction from the animals."

Dr Campbell said while there was significant interest in virtual fencing to contain sheep, it was more challenging to develop an effective collar given their wool and size.

"We wanted to understand would it work in principle with sheep," she said.

"We used commercial dog collars and we put those on them.

"It was all just manual, so with those they're remote operated. You're watching the animals when they approach what you would set as your virtual boundary and you would administer a signal to them."

Dr Campbell said numerous trials were held to study the behaviour of the sheep and to get the signals right. They required a different pulse to cattle given the size difference.

"They've got different behaviour in the group as well," she said.

"They're more tightly flocked than cattle so there was more of an influence of the other animals around them."

Researchers were now looking to trial ear tags in sheep in a bid to develop automated signals, she said.

The next step was to find the optimum weight for an ear tag and if possible, carry out trials on a breed like Dorpers, which had larger ears.

Unlike Queensland, NSW legislation only allowed virtual fencing to be used for research purposes, but Dr Campbell said a lot of the peer-reviewed research was being used to shape legislation nationally.

"The large scale project we did here, in collaboration with other universities in Australia, it was really the only work that had been done on virtual fencing," she said.

"It's since exploded worldwide because everyone wants to use the technology."

The work also compared virtual fencing to standard electric fences and found there was almost no difference between the two, she said.

"They were equally effective and we couldn't find any impacts on the animal in terms of looking at stress hormones, metabolites or looking at the behaviours that they did," she said.

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