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.

Comments

Old news

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Old news

[mrpoundsign7072]

When you put "scientists" in quotes, is it because you're claiming they're not really scientists? Science is meant to test the natural world, often to find out if our assumptions are valid. Re-validating what is already known is actually useful science, though not always as useful as new discoveries.

If you "Ask someone who actually WORKS in the field" and you'll find all kinds of urban myths and wrong assumptions that come along with real actual useful information. Science helps distinguish between the two in a meaningful way. The sensationalism of most news articles about science being done is usually just the news media and not the scientists doing the work making these statements.

So please, don't go around bashing scientists and science just because someone knew something before someone tested a claim.

Re:Old news

[McFly777]

It's amazing to me how "scientists" often know very little about the things they are studying. Ask someone who actually WORKS in the field and they can tell the scientists all sorts of information. The scientists may still be useful to measure and quantify the common knowledge, but it is hardly a new discovery.

From a engineering test background (vs. a pure experimental science backgorund), sometimes it is better not to know too much about the topic which you are about to test, that way you don't bias the results. Or if you might know too much, then you get someone else (your intern?) to actually perform the test.

There is also the aspect of having documentatable proof of what was previously just an anecdotal statement. So the scientist may have talked to a farm/ranch worker. In fact that may be how the researcher got the idea to study in the first place. The "discovery" is really just that this is now a provable statement of fact.

The short version

[Rik Sweeney]

Cows have best friends.