Thermal is usually the better first purchase. Predators move at night, often in long grass or bush where NV line-of-sight is useless, and the heat signature gives you detection distance NV can’t match. Most farmers use thermal to find the animal, then confirm identification visually or with an optic unit before taking any action.

You generally want both — thermal to detect and scan, NV, a top-end thermal or light source to confirm exactly what you’re looking at before anything else happens.

Thermal wins here too — for spotting an intruder approaching across open ground or through vegetation, heat detection at range beats anything light-dependent.

A good night vision monocular covers a lot of ground for less outlay, provided you’re working in open terrain with at least some ambient light or an IR illuminator.

Thermal for detection and scanning, and a conventional or NV optic for identification and precision. They solve different problems.

No — thermal detects surface heat, so it won’t see through solid structures. It performs through some foliage, grass, light cover, and darkness, but not through solid barriers.

Rain and extreme temperature swings can reduce contrast, but thermal remains far more reliable than NV in poor weather, since it doesn’t depend on ambient light at all.

This depends heavily on your primary use case — detection range needed, terrain, and budget. It’s worth having a proper conversation about your specific farm or block before committing, since the “right” unit for a small game farm looking for jackal differs a lot from what a large-scale cattle operation doing perimeter security needs.