Wild hogs have become a huge problem in places like Louisiana, rooting up fields in their quest for food and generally being extraordinary 200 pound pests. Given their size, smarts, and tenacity, feral hogs can be hard to kill—and that's when you can even find them amid all the vegetation. So how do you deal with the problem? If you're like electrical engineers Cy Brown and James Palmer, you strap a $5,000 thermal imaging camera to a remote-controlled airplane, then fly the thing around farmers' fields on weekend evenings until you spot a hog. Then you shoot it from the ground with a night vision-equipped rifle.

Brown and Palmer call their homemade, pig-hunting drone the Dehogaflier. The drone itself runs around $10,000 with all the gear attached, and it can feed live video to a screen on the ground, where the operator flies the plane with a joystick. It sounds expensive, but it can be far cheaper than hog hunting using other methods. (Hog hunting from helicopters is a real thing you can do; its practitioners even use industry-specific puns like "Black Hawg Down.")

A local Louisiana newspaper followed the men out into a field recently to watch the Dehogaflier do its work, and results came quickly:

On this night in late March, the drone looked like a blue UFO overhead, scanning the dark pastures. Within minutes, it picked up a small black form moving across a nearby field. Brown motioned for quiet and told Palmer exactly where to go. “At about 11 o’clock, from the front of the truck,” he said, eyes fixed on his computer screen. Palmer, who is an expert marksman, aimed into the pitch dark, using his night-vision scope, and fired once. In an instant, he had downed a 200-pound wild boar that had been grazing in the fields. The drone had done its job.

Now, you're probably thinking, "Sure, there are safety concerns here, but wouldn't it be way more efficient just to strap the gun to the drone itself? The US Air Force shoots things with drones!" Brown and Palmer actually do much of their research work for the US Air Force—and they have had the same thought. As they told Modern Farmer magazine last month, "It would be so easy to rig it with a gun, it’s trivial. But a lot of people would have no sense of humor whatsoever about that sort of thing."