Can You Potty Train a Cow?

sciencehabit writes "Think potty training a child is hard? Try teaching a cow when and where to do its business. The bovines can defecate nine to 16 times daily, creating big hygiene problems on dairy and beef farms. So cueing the animals to go in the right place would be a big help for managing manure. But past techniques—including training cows to respond to mild electric shocks—have proven ineffective or impractical for wide use. To see if they could come up with a better potty prompt, scientists tested a series of stimuli on a dozen Holstein cows. The milkers stood in or walked through a footbath filled with water, for example, or had air or water sprayed on their feet. Alas, '[n]one of our tests reliably stimulated defecation,' the team reports."

Comments

Apparently not.

[Arancaytar]

I love when the headline question is answered right there in the summary.

Re:All about the rewards

[Eightbitgnosis]

Cows aren't really that smart or independent. A cow will not go off on its own to take a crap. Nor will it be smart enough to realize why it is getting food.

Most likely you'll just have cows accidentally get a treat, the other cows will see this, become jealous, and then crowd the reward bowl until they break it.

What training?

[KC1P]

From the abstract, it sounds as if they made no attempt at all to train the cows -- they were just seeing what would stimulate a cow to poop with no training at all. Or, they were seeing what's the least that counts as a master's thesis! A much more interesting question.

Stop being squeamish

[r_a_trip]

I'm going to get vegetarians and vegans up in arms, but we already treat cows as an industrial product. Why bother trying to get them to defecate with external stimuli. Just go all the way and solve it technically. Just attach a tube to the rectum and pump the manure away to a storage area. Neat and clean.

Don't want the product to suffer? Alter the brain chemistry with pharmaceuticals, so the product is unaware of its condition.