Image credit - Kimberly Fraser/USFWS

Image credit – Kimberly Fraser/USFWS

The other day we covered a hilarious idea that Nivea had where they created a seagull drone that would “poop” sunscreen onto unsuspecting children. Since children are notoriously difficult when it comes to these kinds of things, using a drone and catching them unaware would probably save parents many a headache.

That same concept will soon be applied to animals, or to be more specific, the black-footed ferret. In case you didn’t know, this particular species of ferret is facing a plague epidemic across America, meaning that if we don’t do anything, it could eventually face extinction. To help deal with this crisis, the US government will be deploying drones that will “shoot” vaccine-covered M&Ms at these ferrets in hopes that they will eat the sweets and be vaccinated from the plague at the same time.

According to Randy Machett, a biologist at the US Fish and Wildlife, he claims that this is probably the most efficient way of getting the vaccine to the animals. “We dropped the vaccine out of a bag while walking around, but that’s very hard to do over thousands of acres. Spraying burrows with insecticide to kill the fleas is also labor intensive and not a long-term solution. So we are working with private contractors to develop equipment to drop the vaccine uniformly across an area, rather than one hog getting to eat a big pile of them.”

The vaccines will also be targeted at prairie dogs who are the ferret’s source of food, so essentially this vaccine will be saving both the ferrets and their food source at the same time.

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