aka another use for that low powered green laser.

I was out back the other night playing around with my new LED flashlight (1 watt Luxeon bulb), and happened to spot a pair of beady eyeballs from across the street about 100 feet away. I went back and got my 7x50 binos and soon discovered a large racoon at my neighbor's coy pond. Realizing that in the city limits at night it was probably not wise to be shooting even my pellet gun at the critter, I grabbed a 4mW green laser pointer I had borrowed from a friend for something I was doing at work. Since the racoon obviously had no care whatsoever for the harsh bright light of the LED shining in his face, I wondered how he would respond to the green laser. I swept the beam, which was easy to see in the air, right into his face, and the racoon immediately reacted to the light hitting his retinas. He jumped vertically, spun around, ran straight into a big hedge and bounced back onto his hindquarters, spun again, took off in another direction, and stumbled off the curb and down the road. I could actually hear him running into things after he went under a pasture fence. He was probably night blind the rest of the night at least.

Now, I'm no advocate for cruelty to animals, and I think that both the racoon and I learned something very important that night. First, the racoon learned that being at that fishpond is not a good idea, and I learned that green lasers are effective animal deterrents, at least on racoons. I'll just bet that things such as skunks, badgers, porcupines, and maybe even some big predators that pose serious hazards to humans could be deterred or at least seriously impaired by the use of green laser light in the face, especially at night when their pupils are dilated way open. At that power range, their vision will be significantly impaired for a good 24 hours or more, but probably not permanently as they won't be exposed to it for very long, and hopefully at a sufficient distance to avoid imminent attack. Now if it were 50 mW, they'd be leading by their nose for the rest of their poor blind lives, but at the lower power level, it would be almost like having a shock collar on them.

Thats a pretty good idea, why green lasers though? Are they better than red or something?

I haven't been able to find any of the old news stories but someone brought up a thread on CPF about this recently. The reason was that red lasers were banned in most US cities as a color reserved for LEO's after a kid was shot for "painting" an LEO in a bad part of town. I do remember reading about the ban on more than one news source but knowing how inacurate they can be at times maybe they pulled the stories afterward.

The wavelength for green (lasers and anything else) is the most receptive wavelength to the human eye (and apparently for raccoons too). What this effectively means is that a green laser will appear alot brighter than a red laser of the same power. Or, a green laser doesn't have to be nearly as powerful as a red one to be an effective pointer. The main reason that red has been used for so long is that red lasers are alot easier to make and are alot cheaper than the green ones.

Greg

THANKS for the idea... the neighborhood stray population may never be the same <img src="images/graemlins/grin.gif" alt="" /> <img src="images/graemlins/grin.gif" alt="" /> <img src="images/graemlins/grin.gif" alt="" />

Troy