While not much gets past WUWT, this story from Portugal has only recently gotten some press, well after its posting in March, and I think it warrants attention here. While I don’t know much about horses, I’ve known several people who do, so I do know that just because a horse will let you ride it, it may look for a low hanging branch to walk under to scrape you off.
Not surprisingly, I had never heard of “Acquired flexural deformity of the distal interphalangeal joint,” but I came across a web page, Can Wind Turbines Cause Developmental Deformities In Horses? about a stud farm where horses developed downward pointing front hooves after several wind turbines were built nearby.
If I were a horse, I would not want my feet to look like the one on the right:
No other changes in rearing the Lusitano horses (a famous Portuguese horse breed that I never heard of) were known. In the ensuing investigation, “two of the affected foals were placed in a pasture away from the initial one and two others were admitted at the Faculty of Veterinary Medicine of Lisbon. In those animals, except for one that had to be euthanized for humane reasons, an improvement was observed on their condition, with partial recovery of the deformity.”
The stud farm was studied as part of a masters thesis by Teresa Margarida Pereira Costa e Curto and it surmised:
Cellular Mechanotransduction is the mechanism by which cells convert mechanical signals into biochemical responses. Based on the mechanical effects on cells it was proposed in this research project that the ground vibrations were responsible for a increased bone growth which was not accompanied by the muscle-tendon unit growth leading to the development of these flexural deformities.
That sounds reasonable to me, I know that stressing human bones increases their calcium uptake, and I wouldn’t be surprised that something like that could affect feet in other animals.
The wind turbines are obvious prime suspect, they were built nearby:
So, WUWT readers who actually know something about horses, have you heard of this case or similar cases at other farms with new wind turbines? Or, if you live near wind farms that are near farms with horses, cattle, etc, have they had problems like this?
This is just one study, involving one farm and not very many horses, clearly more research is warranted. If it’s confirmed, it would be interesting to know if other animals are susceptible to a similar problem.
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@Ric Wereme:
I am sure you can find my email address. Pop me an email I will put you in touch with the fellow that made the recordings.
Cheers
author saw something and questioned it and gets jumped on.
nice.
and regarding cat vs windmill stuff, a cat cannot be jailed for killing a bird yet a human (who builds the windmills) can be fined/jailed here in US just for picking up a feather or getting an inheritance containing eagle feathers.
an oil company finds dead birds on property not killed by them, they self report the findings as required by law for them and get fined.
windmills are given a free pass on ALL of this.
so take your hypocrisy crap about cats and shove it up your windmill.
[snip – too many off color references – mod]
Hobbyist-priced geo-phone sensors:
Geophone Sensor Only – http://www.bgmicro.com/GeophoneSensor.aspx
Geophone Seismic Kit – http://www.bgmicro.com/GeophoneKit.aspx
Mount the geophone to a sheet of plywood for low-freq ‘air’ vibes.
Couple that with an NI DC-10 kHz DAQ (data acquisition card) and a LabVIEW app and you’re in business … (PC sound cards have low-freq rolloff which may discourage their use).
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Didn’t see the topical category “stray voltage” mentioned, also known as AC mains-induced ‘ground currents’ or neutral-currents returned via earth. A few references on the subject follow.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stray_voltage
http://www.uwex.edu/uwmril/pdf/StrayVoltage/03_What_do_we_know_about_Stray_Voltage.pdf
http://maec.msu.edu/Copy%20of%20understanding_neutral_to_earth.pdf
Here is an example of a researcher seeing ground currents while in search of “Schumann Resonance” also via ground currents …. plainly evident is the ‘mains’ frequency energy as well as commuter train 16 2/3 Hz supply:
http://www.vlf.it/sven/schumannunderground.html
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Gene Selkov says:
September 26, 2013 at 9:07 pm
And even the bird & bat masscre is I think being exaggerated. Hit them for what they actually do: they hurt our wallets and support fraud.
###
That it is happening at all is significant in that it highlights the true motivation of the green hoard.
DesertYote (speaking of bird killings):
> That it is happening at all is significant in that it highlights the true motivation of the green hoard.
Totally agree and am likewise disgusted. Deaths at oil companies’ sites are dramatised and stories of them perpetuated, transportation-related deaths are ignored and wind turbine-caused deaths are censored.
But I myself have yet to see a bird (let alone a dead one) anywhere near a wind turbine (not that there is a lack of both where I live). So I have a sense that those of us who oppose wind development focus their energy on the wrong issue. If they really cared about not killing any birds, they ought to argue against the use of inter-city buses. I have experienced bird collisions dozens of times while riding a bus, and my own car killed a grouse and a wood pigeon just last month.
@Sparks
“If you are handy with electronics it is possible to build a detector, all you need is a LNB (Low Noise Block) a cheep dish tuner and an 18v power supply, an incoming signal is picked up and converted by the LNB to something closer to 1000 MHz, which can be used as an input to any sound card…”
You probably used an amplitude demodulation like a diode detector just before the sound card, right?
AFAIK this setup detect microwave thermal emission (blackbody) and noise from “hidden” electronics, but is it capable of detecting minuscule mechanical variation occurring at pointed objects? Is it showing behavior consistent w/t mixing effect w/t its own radiated Local Oscillator and giving Doppler signal?
My point is microwave wavelength seem probably too long to extract from phase noise the Doppler information of a micron amplitude mechanical variation at infrasound frequency.
Also another comment on sound card low frequency cutoff is correct, no card to my knowledge let pass DC or very low frequency. The signal must be “upmixed” to audio range.
Ric alerted me about this interesting discussion. Here’s my paper about the factoid of wind farms causing “vibroacoustic disease” – includes the issue of boxy foot at that farm. http://ses.library.usyd.edu.au//bitstream/2123/9106/2/ANZJPH%282013%29-VAD.pdf also my collection of diseases and symptoms that anti wind woo websites say are caused by wind turbines http://tobacco.health.usyd.edu.au/assets/pdfs/publications/WindfarmDiseases.pdf; plus a recent couple of blogs of mine http://theconversation.com/wind-turbine-syndrome-farm-hosts-tell-very-different-story-18241 and https://theconversation.com/wind-turbine-syndrome-a-classic-communicated-disease-8318
Just in case anyone is still reading this, who actually cares about birds, from today 9/27/2013:
It is already a federal crime to kill even one of the eagles, a felony. Power companies are prosecuted and fined for their deaths from power lines and transformers.
We know the death count is severely under-reported, the true numbers covered up. This would be a fig leaf, they’ll “voluntarily report” up to the five allowed.
Isn’t this like giving a serial killer permission to murder up to five people, in exchange for a promise to try to stop randomly slaughtering passerby who bump into them?
[A horse] may look for a low hanging branch to walk under to scrape you off.
In fact it may find a branch to gallop under wiping you off like a bit of dandruff. The impact can break ribs and cause you to cough up the lining of your throat. With me only the throat lining came up but my dad collected broken ribs once.
As regards the hoof deformity, I would really want to eliminate the effect of inbreeding. A rare recessive becoming fixed seems more likely than the article’s suggestion. It should be relatively easy to look at animals in comparable areas (say in California) and try to determine whether there is a corresponding increase in the deformity. I know there are plenty of horses and cattle grazing in the wind farm areas east of the San Francisco Bay Area.
[Well, they did bring in two other horses that appeared to start developing the condition. It might be worthwhile in future tests to keep the visitors separate from the residents. -Ric]
[i]Prof Simon Chapman says:
September 27, 2013 at 2:04 pm
Ric alerted me about this interesting discussion. Here’s my paper about the factoid of wind farms causing “vibroacoustic disease” – includes the issue of boxy foot at that farm.[/i]
Dr. Chapman, I note that you are a sociologist. Industrial Wind Turbines seem to be a far remove from your specialty. Your papers seem to comment on the noise aspects and the health aspects of wind turbines. I am curious as to how you gained the expertise to comment on the medical aspect as well as whether wind turbines do indeed produce noise — which seems to be more on an engineering or acoustics aspect.
http://ses.library.usyd.edu.au/bitstream/2123/8977/4/Complaints%20FINAL.pdf
e.g. page 14 where you diagnose the effects of the noise as “psychogenic”. That’s an interesting diagnosis.
Apparently this symptom is apparent since 2009 — when the very large modern wind turbines appeared — the ones that reach up to 450 feet tall. They also do seem to generate a lot of pulsed sound — at frequencies that are inaudible and can only be measured by specialized equipment.
I am also curious as to whether you were able to find studies where the levels of the low frequency sounds were actually measured.
Cheers.
Perhaps it was due to the proximity of high power lines that carry the current from the windmills. Oh, wait, that was leukemia in children, sorry.
Gareth Phillips says:
September 26, 2013 at 11:54 pm
You put numbers into perspective. Allways a good thing.
I once heard a higly educated woman say she was worried that satelites might increase “Global Warming” .
Right.
Actually, Satellites DID increase global warming. Isn’t that how they created the Hockey Stick, by splicing satellite data onto the end of proxy data induced temperature reconstructions?
Without the Satellite data, the Proxy Reconstruction data indicates we are in a cooling trend
ALA “Hide the Decline”
I might proffer, Rod, that you’re seeing what some others of us have seen, to wit, a developed ‘culture’ in the throat owing to possible post nasal drip or other conditions amenable to bacterial growth … for me, until a means to assure this ‘culture’ was suppressed, I suffered yearly sore throats that also developed symptoms into the lungs and sinuses as well.
The remedy I pursued involved the use of Cayenne Pepper in preventative capacity, as a preventative measure.
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Gareth Phillips says:
September 26, 2013 at 11:54 pm
Seeing there is general agreement that the horse hoof / wind turbine study is complete tosh, I thought it”
Gareth- is that your 97% consensus?
I used to live someplace where a VW dealership was a few miles down the road, and when my VW Rabbit needed service, I’d drive down there and bicycle back. Later, bike down and drive back. The road was pretty active then, now it’s a four lane commercial strip, but once or twice I came down with a cold or flu a few days later, especially on chilly, damp days. I’ve smelled cigar smoke from passing cars before, so I assume I can intercept aerosols from people with sneezes or coughs.