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• Over the last year, 13 people have been killed by bears in Japan, with an additional 50,000 sightings recorded. The bears roamed near schools and broke into homes, supermarkets and resorts.
Now, Japanese company Ohta Seiki has come up with a unique solution to the country's bear problem: robot wolves.
Yahoo! News reports that orders for the animatronic "Monster Wolf" are up by so much that the waiting list is a few months long.
"We make them by hand," company president Yuji Ohta said. "We cannot make them fast enough now. We are asking our customers to wait two to three months."
The "wolves" are made of pipe frames attached to speakers and covered with artificial fur. They can make up to 50 different sounds, including recorded human voices and electronic noises, and their eyes and tails flash with red and blue LEDs.
Orders have come mainly from people who work in rural areas, such as farmers, construction workers and golf course operators.
The wolf apparatus starts at $4,000.