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Animal Behaviour Specialists Map Out the Social Networks of Cows
KentuckyFC writes In a classic The Far Side cartoon by Gary Larson, a group of cows stand on two legs chatting by the side of a road when a lookout shouts "car". The cows immediately drop to a four-legged stance as the car passes by and return to their usual position and continue chatting when it has gone. Now a team of animal behavior specialists have discovered that the social lives of cattle are more complex than biologists had ever imagined (although not quite into Larson territory). These guys attached RFID tags to 70 Holstein-Fresian calves kept in three pens. They then monitored the position of each cow for a week to see which other animals they tended to have contact with. This allowed them to construct the social network for the cows with unprecedented detail. It turns out these social networks have many of the properties of human social networks. Cows have preferred partners who they tend to spend more time with and 60 per cent of their contacts occur during feeding which amounts to only 6 per cent of their time. The work has important applications. It should help biologists more accurately model how disease spreads through herds of cattle and therefore better understand how to tackle epidemics.
for my Mrs
I object to the idea that humans are anything like cows. In fact, we're more like sheep, which are easier to herd, hairier, and generally taste worse than beef does.
I see an IPO on the horizon..
Coming from a ranching family, this is old news. In those circles, its common knowledge that cows have 'buddies' who they spend most of their time with. It actually becomes useful to the rancher to be aware of such things. First, most cattle are tagged with an ear tag with a number to aid in logging sickness, vaccinations, pregnancy etc. Now, because cattle have "Friends" My dad has pointed out times where he realized that when he saw cow #1, it was always with cow #2. If he saw either cow #2 or cow #1 alone, it was a likely indicator that something was wrong with the other cow, as it was unable to keep up with its friend. Things like this have been understood and useful to the people who deal with livestock, probably since the dawn if domestication.
So this is the next frontier in social networking? Farmville is so human, the next killer app is cow clicker.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Cows have best friends.
Summation 2
Moo, moo, moooo *snort* mooo!
My cow friend just wanted to weigh in on this article as well. He finds the finding unsurprising and obvious.
I'll feed the troll. I may not posses a 4 digit UID but I've been around there parts of over 10 years, and I have never seen an overwhelming majority of people support any form of animal abuse. Eating animals? Sure. But supporting inhumane treatment of animals? Not so much. There will always be a few, but it's never been a majority from what I've seen. I guess you could be considering eating animals inhumane, if that's the case, that explains the so called irrationality you seem to be faced with.
Human social networks have characteristics of bovine social networks.
Although my first guess would have been sheep rather than cattle.
Any insufficiently advanced magic is indistinguishable from technology.
I realize that this is likely a rhetorical question, but the answer would be to have a lot of offspring. Typically, the higher the cost to have offspring, the more care will be given to said offspring.
Also, I don't see what the connection is between emotions and eating meat. Sentience doesn't magically make something taste bad. Adult humans allegedly taste more or less like pork.
This is my signature. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
How I have missed thee.
Coke snorting yuppie cows!
Do cows in South America eat coca leaves? Or is it a natural taste they love, like cats and tuna?
Look out...Here comes Zuckercud pitching his cowbook idea again!
"A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it." - K
Oh bull..... Why do you need a GPS collar to figure this out?
If you've ever spent any time with a head of cows, this would be pretty obvious. Why it takes a study with GPS tags to determine individual bovines have an affinity for specific other individual ones is beyond me. When we ran the dairy operation, it was pretty obvious to me. Individuals would show up in the milking barn in a pretty consistent order and it seemed to me that they had small groups within the larger group. When we where running beef cows, just watching them graze and seeing where they ended up chewing their cud in the hot afternoons or how they bedded down at night would show this too.
So, why you go though all the trouble to fit cows with GPS and then log their every move is beyond me. Just ask you average group of cattlemen for their observations and I'll bet you can figure it out.
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
Not all animal species care for their young. Some species of sea turtles, for example, bury their eggs and then leave. The eggs hatch, the turtles crawl to the sea, and begin their life. The parents aren't around at all. Thanks to our species' typical behavior (parents raising their children) we can sometimes think this is the only way it can be, but there are many different parenting models in the animal kingdom.
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
How do they know when it's going to rain?
They always lie down before it rains... are the cows hooked in to NOAA? Or, is that where AccuWeather gets that "probability of precipitation" number?
...is what the ad revenue looks like on RuminantBook.
In addition to what everyone else has sad, animal parents often don't risk their lives to save their young. If there is a food shortage, they will let them starve to death. The parent can always have more offspring, but the offspring can't take care of themselves.
Cow Clicker is dead. Let's get the milk and the butter, make chocolate and dough, and play Cookie Clicker.
"It should help biologists more accurately model how disease spreads through herds of cattle and therefore better understand how to tackle epidemics."
For me, it would be 'it should give people second thought on what we're doing to our fellow earthlings'.
How about privacy? If cows are social beings, shouldn't they have privacy? Do we need a Snowden to make the cows aware of the extensive monitoring they are subjected to?
It's not surprising that herds of cows have a social structure. They're herd animals. It may be hard to see in a feeding pen situation without this kind of tracking, but when they have a lot of room to move around, groups form. It's a bit harder to see this in a group of uniformly bred dairy cattle, though.
Horse herd social structure is well understood. There are buddies, little groups, and an overall hierarchy. If you want to see the hierarchy, set out food buckets, one at a time, and see who eats first. The order will usually be the same each time you do this.
Even chickens have a "pecking order".
The only part of this that is surprising is that the scientists are able to waste grant money on this. No, I shouldn't be surprised because a lot of the things they waste researching they could have just asked. We farmers are well aware of much of what seems to surprise the scientists. I would suggest it is time to get more of those researchers out of their ivory towers and put them back to work doing real labor in the fields producing real food.
Bullshit (no pun) The ISO 11784/5 animal tags do NOT allow for centimeter resolution. They're lucky to get a meter resolution.