The Inner Lives of Cows

By theadmin

There are few animals whose intelligence is as commonly insulted as the cow. Perhaps because they can look so placid standing out in the grass chewing their cud, cows have become synonymous with being slow or dim-witted, as in the insults “dumb cow” or “dumb ox.” Their perceived lack of mental capacities may explain why we keep and eat so many of them; there are estimated to be around 1 billion cows worldwide, and approximately 39 million cows are consumed in the U.S. each year.

But the reality is cows are anything but stupid animals. In fact, recent scientific studies have demonstrated that cows are clever and curious animals capable of problem-solving as well as deep emotions and strong friendships. The more scientists learn about the lives of cows, the more they recognize that cows have unique personalities and characteristics and can communicate with both each other and humans — if the humans are paying attention to the right things. Of course, anyone who has worked with cows likely knows this. For years, farmers have spoken and written about the remarkable inner lives of cows, who express both joy and grief.

“Cows see and smell human emotion,” the British farmer John Lewis Stempel wrote in Country Life in 2020. “And they understand. They are all-feeling creatures themselves. They know the state of joy — you should see our lot running around after being released from the winter paddocks onto springtime grass, tails streaming flat out and trumpeting like an oompah band — and they know pain. Dairy calves de-horned without anaesthetic play less than their compatriots de-horned with painkiller.”

What the recent studies do, however, is put confirmed data to the behaviors farmers have observed anecdotally. And for those who have never been closer to a cow than in the grocery store aisle, it may change the way you think about them.

‘Moo’ Approaches to Behavioral Psychology

For much of the 20th century, the scientific community did not believe you could measure animals’ emotional behavior, so they thought investigations into animal emotional intelligence fell outside the realm of science. It wasn’t always that way. In 1872, Charles Darwin wrote a book that examined commonalities between the emotional expressions of humans and animals. But, as the world industrialized, and both science and humanity at large took a more mechanistic view of animal behavior, fewer people had firsthand experiences with animals.

Those who lived with cows, however, knew what fantastic creatures they are. Farmer Rosamund Young wrote a book in 2003 called “The Secret Life of Cows” that described her cows’ friendships with their peers, the simple acts of affection they displayed, and qualities she described as empathy, guile, altruism, happiness, and eccentricity. Her book was republished in 2018 after a landmark 2017 study gave it credence; two scientists — Lori Marino of the Kimmela Center and Kristin Allen of Florida State University — performed a comprehensive comparative review of the scientific literature and found evidence that “cow behavior points to more complex cognitive, emotional and social characteristics.”

So, what are cows really thinking?

Learning and Cognition

Various studies of cow behavior have uncovered an ability to learn different tasks rapidly as well as evidence of long-term memory. Cows moved from their herds or grazing grounds could find their way back home. They were able to locate hidden objects, discriminate between complex stimuli, and tell humans apart. In some studies, cows made these distinctions by recognizing the colors of the clothes worn by people they interacted with — meaning if two people swapped their clothes, they could fool the cows. But other studies show that cows retain memories of people who have been the source of trauma. “Calves as well as adult cows show learned fear responses to humans who have previously handled them in a rough manner,” Marino and Allen write.

Emotions

Scientists have observed bovine emotional behavior via the two main ways in which cows express themselves: the positioning of their ears and the whites of their eyes. Cows allowed daily access to open pastures or less crowded housing had relaxed ears. Observers also recognized that cows expressed fear by showing the whites of their eyes, and the more playful and sociable they appeared, the less white they showed. When cow mothers were separated from their calves, they showed an increase in their eye whites.

Experiences of pain or stress also impact cows’ behavior. After cows were branded with a hot iron, they demonstrated a decreased ability to judge ambiguous stimuli — in the same way humans are less perceptive after a painful or traumatic event. After dairy calves are disbudded, they run around and play less. One paper compared the behavior of horned and dehorned cows and found the cows that did not go through the experience of having their horns removed were more playful and “optimistic.”

Unique Voices and Personalities

One of the more remarkable recent studies of cow behavior analyzed 333 recordings of cow vocalizations over six months in various contexts and found that each cow appears to possess his or her own unique vocal characteristics. Not only were calves able to recognize the sound of their mothers’ moos, but animals within the herd appeared to differentiate themselves and communicate with each other through the sounds of their voice.

Cow vocalizations also expressed excitement, engagement, arousal, and distress. Studies also found that cows communicate over long and short distances and got excited when completing certain kinds of tasks that were rewarded with food, just as your dog might.

The implication: Cows contain a full range of personality types, including boldness, shyness, sociability, gregariousness, and being temperamental. These are the kinds of individual behaviors that farmers like Young wrote about.

Social Complexity

Unsurprisingly, unique individuals living in herds form unique interpersonal bonds. Researchers and farmers have both observed friendship connections and signs of affection between herd members. Marino and Allen observed that these kinds of cow behaviors fit the definition of what behavioralists describe as “social complexity.”

The research, they write, shows that “given a general definition of social complexity as the number of differentiated relationships, the knowledge about conspecifics, and the knowledge of one’s own and other animals’ social interactions and relationships, cows display broad parameters of social complexity in empirical studies.”

Sometimes this can manifest in two cows that sleep adjacent to each other, heads touching, night after night. Others have seen mother cows position themselves between their calves and an unfamiliar vehicle approaching the pasture.

Just Like Us?

As much as these kinds of behaviors suggest a humanlike quality to the interior life of cows, some animal behaviorists caution against over anthropomorphizing the animals — that is, ascribing human motivations to them. This doesn’t mean that cows aren’t smart, perceptive, and emotionality sophisticated animals. It just means that cow intelligence is different from human intelligence. Their understanding and personalities are shaped by seeing the world through cows’ eyes. In a way, that makes them even more special. They are experiencing the world in their own unique way, and we can learn a lot about cows, their world, and ourselves from what they see.

Learn more thoughts on farming from this citrus scientist or this rancher.