The Swiss city of Geneva pulled the plug on its anti-drone “eagle brigade”, a programme meant to train birds of prey to intercept mechanical drones in the air and safeguard dignitaries.

Officials decided to end the five-year-old project because of concerns about the welfare of the birds, the Swiss newspaper Le Matin Dimanche reported.

“The technological and strategic improvements in terms of the use of drones make this project of using raptors too uncertain, even dangerous for the physical integrity of the eagles,” the press service of the Geneva Cantonal Police told the newspaper.

The original plan, hatched in 2017, was to train the raptors to grab small mechanical drones out of the air without the machines falling to the ground.

Geneva often serves as a neutral meeting place for international summits and world leaders and the trained-eagle programme was seen as part of an enhanced security effort. US President Joe Biden met with Russia’s Vladimir Putin in the Swiss city in June 2021.

Umberto Nassisi, the head of Geneva’s Falco Association, the falconery group that had been training two eagles, named Altaïr and Draco, for the programme, told the newspaper he was saddened by the decision to scrap the effort.

“This represents around 100,000 francs of investment and hundreds of hours of work,” he said.

Geneva police will now focus on anti-drone tactics similar to those used by the neighboring canton of Vaud such as signal jamming, detection systems and net guns, Le Matin Dimanche reported.

Police in the Netherlands also had a short-lived drone-hunting eagle programme that was ended in 2017 after a year.

 - Bloomberg