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| Volume 9, Number 9 | January 11, 2002 |
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NSERC-funded project aims to find out what cows think
By Elizabeth Frogley SPARK Writer Why do cows get stressed in large groups? Do they recognize other cows? What do they know about each other? These are some of the questions University of Saskatchewan researcher Jon Watts is trying to answer. He hopes to learn more about how cows think, information which may help farmers create environments which are less stressful and healthier for the animals. Watts, a member of the animal behavior research group at the Western College of Veterinary Medicine on the U of S campus, has an NSERC post-doctoral fellowship to study the process of social cognition and welfare in cattle. 
“Certainly there is individual recognition between cows, there’s no doubt about that, But we don’t know how far that extends in large groups,” he says. Cattle form complex social hierarchies in which the strongest cows dominate others. Watts thinks that cows in groups of more than 200 on commercial feedlots get stressed, don’t form a stable social structure, and constantly fight for dominance. He says this is because cows can’t keep track of all the other cows they live with in a large group. “My feeling about recognition is that once you exceed a certain number, it never really happens – they never really sort out the social dynamic of who’s the boss,” Watts says. The problem is a result of what Watts calls the “abnormal” social environments in which cattle are kept. The conditions they live in are radically different from those of their ancestors. They are kept in large groups, subject to early weaning and are housed in feedlots where they don’t have adequate social space. “Little attention has been paid to the possible welfare consequences for animals suddenly deprived of adult contact and thrust into large groups of single sex, single age individuals,” he says. Watts hopes to find out how animals recognize each other – whether they need interaction, sight, hearing, smell or some combination of these. The first step is to train cows to respond to questions. Watts plans to train the animals to push buttons or levers to demonstrate a choice, and reward them with food when they choose correctly. For example, he hopes to teach the cows to identify whether another animal is familiar or unfamiliar by pushing a lever. Watts will show the trained cows other cows under a variety of conditions. By taking away some of the information cows normally have about each other, Watts hopes to discover which information is essential to cows in identifying others. For instance, he might show them a video of another cow with the sound and picture but without the animal’s smell. But that’s not all Watts hopes to discover by having cattle watch TV. “We want to find out what kinds of things they know about other individuals,” he says. “Do they tend to categorize other individuals as male or female, dominant or subordinate, friends or foes?” Humans differentiate cows by breed, gender, or age because these aspects are important from the production perspective and because we differentiate between people on these bases. But these may not be the way cattle perceive each other. “What are the natural categories into which cattle classify each other? It’s difficult to find that out, but what we can do is see how easily they learn to group cattle according to our categories,” he says. For example, if cattle can easily make a distinction between male and female animals, it will indicate that this is an important distinction to them. Watts, team leader Joseph Stookey and graduate students Derek Haley and Jean Clavelle want to learn more about the cognitive ability of cattle. Though cattle have been domesticated for centuries, they aren’t well understood. “We don’t need to go into outer space to look for alien intelligence because we have it right here on Earth,” he says with a chuckle.
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