“I need the wolves to respond and know that, hey, humans are bad,” a USDA district supervisor said
Wolves hoping to feast on livestock on farms across the country have had their appetite spoiled by the sound of Scarlett Johansson and Adam Driver arguing. According to the Wall Street Journal, the USDA has programmed drone cowhands to broadcast the explosive argument scene from Noah Baumbach’s Marriage Story, in which the two actors spend four minutes screaming about how much they hate each other, to scare the predators away.
“I need the wolves to respond and know that, hey, humans are bad,” the Oregon-based USDA district supervisor, Paul Wolf, said in the report. Wolf has, fittingly, been leading operations on wolf hazing with drones for three years. The strategy was deployed in response to an uptick in wolves devouring cattle at concerning rates. In one 20-day period, 11 cows were killed in Oregon’s Klamath Basin.
But once the wolves heard the drone audio — the report doesn’t specify any particular section of the scene, so we’re going with Driver screaming “Every day I wake up and hope you’re dead” and immediately breaking down in tears — they were deterred. A subsequent 85-day period showed that only two cows were killed.
Trending Stories
The USDA also found that AC/DC’s 1990 single “Thunderstruck” has been helpful in scaring off hungry wolves, as well as fireworks and gunshots. The crew members steering the drones in the dark of the night will sometimes call out to the animals themselves. In the report, the wildlife biologist Colby McAdams yelled, “Hey get out of here! Get!” The wolf responded to the noise, but Johansson’s screaming “You gaslighted me, you’re a fucking villain” would be so much more cinematic.
Whether the drones are a suitable long-term solution remains to be seen. If the wolves develop a tolerance to Marriage Story, the USDA could always try Andrew Garfield howling “Sorry, my Prada’s at the cleaners along with my hoodie and my ‘fuck you’ flip-flops, you pretentious douchebag” in The Social Network.