How digitanimal GPS helped find the animal
Just a few weeks ago we received some photos from Cantabria with which one of our customers told us how the digitanimal GPS collar had helped him to rescue one of his animals, and it was not the first time!
From Calseca, a small town in the Cantabrian municipality of Ruesga, Javier Pérez Abascal sent us some photos to share with us the rescue of one of his animals thanks to our GPS goat tracker and to thank us. After hearing about it, we immediately contacted him so that he could inform us in more detail.
As you already know, at digitanimal we give a lot of value to any experience that we receive from our customers with GPS devices, as we consider that this information is very valuable in order to continue improving a system that has already proved to be a very helpful tool on several occasions.
Very kindly, Javier began by telling us that the trapped goat had just arrived at the farm he owns with Juan Abascal Setien “for genetic improvement”, which means that it is an animal with a high cost of “almost €1,000, which for a male goat, a goat, is quite a lot of money”.
For these two reasons, Javier and Juan fitted one of the GPS goat collars they already had on their goats and the decision could not have been more successful, as Javier’s full account shows:
«When we went to see them where the first collar was marked, there was the whole flock, the whole herd of goats. With the second collar, we went to where it was marked and it wasn’t there. At first we thought he might have lost it, but we realised that he hadn’t lost it, that we were missing the male. We were looking for him around where he was marking and in the end we found him. If it hadn’t been for the collar, it would have been impossible to find him, because we had no idea that there was that fox there. He would have been a dead animal. Luckily, we always go into the bush prepared with ropes, so we tied him up and pulled him up by weight and were able to relocate him with the other animals».
It was certainly a story with a happy ending thanks to our system. Apparently, this was not the first compromising situation in which the use of our collar helped save animals from this farm. When asked about its use since they opted for digitanimal, Javier shared with us how it had been decisive on three other occasions.
5 goats dead and the rest trapped after a wolf attack
A year ago, something similar happened to them with some goats that “were trapped in a rocky outcrop and couldn’t get out”. This time it was due to an attack by wolves, as Javier explained: “they killed five goats and the rest were scattered and we couldn’t find them, it just so happened that where they were trapped there was no cover”.
Despite the fact that it was a very complicated area with coverage, after a few hours the GPS managed to send their position. Thanks to it, they were able to find them and get them out of there:
«They had moved more than two kilometres, they had gone down to the river front and we didn’t think they had gone that far, we wouldn’t have looked for them in that area. Thanks to the GPS position we found them, otherwise they would have died of hunger and thirst. We had to make a ladder so that the goats could climb out of the hillside, because there was a wall of three metres of smooth stone, which they jumped down and couldn’t get out»
Livestock farmers scare off wolves in time in the middle of the night mist
On another occasion, three years ago, Javier was alerted on his mobile phone by an ‘animal out of the enclosure’ alert from one of the goats that had their collars on on a foggy evening:
«We took the car and rushed to where they were. The bells were ringing loudly, we were already warned that the wolves were in the area. We started to call out and went up to where they were and they stopped running, then the bells stopped ringing and they left. The next day when we got a good look at them, there were three goats that had been bitten, but they didn’t manage to kill any of them. That was thanks to the collar»
Puppies found in a cave the GPS collar on the bitch after giving birth.
And it’s not just the goats that are safe on this Calseca livestock farm. Last year the mastiff dog that accompanies Javier and Juan’s goats in the bush went into labour while she was with them:
«For three days we would see the dog come out during the day, but at night she would hide again and we couldn’t get hold of her. On the fourth day, we managed to catch her and we took the opportunity to change the collar from the goat to the dog. That afternoon we saw that she had gone 600 metres away from the herd of goats in a cave where she had given birth. We found the puppies and brought both the bitch and the puppies down. If we hadn’t found them by GPS, it would have taken us about a month”.»
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