The secret life of moody cows

[yoshomon]

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2087-1502933,00.html
Jonathan Leake, Science Editor

ONCE they were a byword for mindless docility. But cows have a secret mental life in which they bear grudges, nurture friendships and become excited over intellectual challenges, scientists have found.

Cows are also capable of feeling strong emotions such as pain, fear and even anxiety — they worry about the future. But if farmers provide the right conditions, they can also feel great happiness.

The findings have emerged from studies of farm animals that have found similar traits in pigs, goats, chickens and other livestock. They suggest that such animals may be so emotionally similar to humans that welfare laws need to be rethought.

Christine Nicol, professor of animal welfare at Bristol University, said even chickens may have to be treated as individuals with needs and problems.

“Remarkable cognitive abilities and cultural innovations have been revealed,” she said. “Our challenge is to teach others that every animal we intend to eat or use is a complex individual, and to adjust our farming culture accordingly.”

Nicol will be presenting her findings to a scientific conference to be held in London next month by Compassion in World Farming, the animal welfare lobby group.

John Webster, professor of animal husbandry at Bristol, has just published a book on the topic, Animal Welfare: Limping Towards Eden. “People have assumed that intelligence is linked to the ability to suffer and that because animals have smaller brains they suffer less than humans. That is a pathetic piece of logic,” he said.

Webster and his colleagues have documented how cows within a herd form smaller friendship groups of between two and four animals with whom they spend most of their time, often grooming and licking each other. They will also dislike other cows and can bear grudges for months or years.

Dairy cow herds can also be intensely sexual. Webster describes how the cows become excited when one of the herd comes into heat and start trying to mount her. “Cows look calm, but really they are gay nymphomaniacs,” he said.

Donald Broom, professor of animal welfare at Cambridge University, who is presenting other research at the conference, will describe how cows can also become excited by solving intellectual challenges.

In one study, researchers challenged the animals with a task where they had to find how to open a door to get some food. An electroencephalograph was used to measure their brainwaves.

“Their brainwaves showed their excitement; their heartbeat went up and some even jumped into the air. We called it their Eureka moment,” said Broom.

The assumption that farm animals cannot suffer from conditions that would be considered intolerable for humans is partly based on the idea that they are less intelligent than people and have no “sense of self”.

Increasingly, however, research reveals this to be untrue. Keith Kendrick, professor of neurobiology at the Babraham Institute in Cambridge, has found that even sheep are far more complex than realised and can remember 50 ovine faces — even in profile. They can recognise another sheep after a year apart.

Kendrick has also described how sheep can form strong affections for particular humans, becoming depressed by long separations and greeting them enthusiastically even after three years.

The Compassion in World Farming conference will be opened with a keynote speech by Jane Goodall, the primatologist who founded the study of animal sentience with her research into chimpanzees in the early 1960s.

Goodall overturned the then accepted belief that animals were simply automatons showing little individuality or emotions. It has taken many years, however, for scientists to accept that such ideas could be applied to a wide range of other animals.

“Sentient animals have the capacity to experience pleasure and are motivated to seek it,” said Webster. “You only have to watch how cows and lambs both seek and enjoy pleasure when they lie with their heads raised to the sun on a perfect English summer’s day. Just like humans.”

[boyinastitch]

im afraid of the cows around where i live...little did i know they probaly want to be friends.

[sleazosaurus]

that makes me so sad...

[the happy prole]

Well, if we stopped eating cows there just wouldn't be any more cows because they'd have no use. It's not like they could survive in our modern world.

Is the life of a free-range cattle or chicken worse than being born in Africa, suffering horribly for a few years, then dying of starvation? There's no doubt in my mind that even "lower-sentient" creatures feel pain and happiness. Probably more intensely than we do actually, since they are so hard-wired into patterns of behavior.

The way I see it, the only way out of this mess is humanely eliminate about 50% of the population (drawing heavily from Americans). Then there'll be enough resources to share. I'll volunteer if you will.

[Lidja]

when someone says "cow" i think "tipping"

[Sushi]

On a similar note, an article from today's NYTimes:
March 1, 2005
Looking for Personality in Animals, of All People
By CARL ZIMMER

A team of Dutch scientists is trying to solve the mystery of personality. Why are some individuals shy while others are bold, for example? What roles do genes and environment play in shaping personalities? And most mysterious of all, how did they evolve?

The scientists are carrying out an ambitious series of experiments to answer these questions. They are studying thousands of individuals, observing how they interact with others, comparing their personalities to their descendants' and analyzing their DNA.

It may come as a surprise that their subjects have feathers. The scientists, based at the Netherlands Institute of Ecology, are investigating personalities of wild birds.

Until recently, most experts in personality would have considered such a study as nothing but foolish anthropomorphism. "It's been looked at with suspicion and contempt," said Dr. Samuel Gosling, a psychologist at the University of Texas.

But scientists have found that in many species, individual animals behave in consistently different ways. They argue that these differences meet the scientific definition of personality.

If they are right, then human personality has deep evolutionary roots. "It's a matter of degree, not of differences," said Dr. Piet Drent of the Netherlands Institute of Ecology.

The bird study that Dr. Drent and his colleagues are conducting is considered the most ambitious investigation of personality in wild animals.

"They've gone the furthest," said Dr. Sasha Dall, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Exeter in Cornwall.

The Dutch researchers are studying the importance of genes to the personalities of the birds, and the effect different personalities have on their survival. They hope next to carry out parallel studies in humans to see whether the same forces behind the evolution of bird personalities are at work in our own species.

The science of human personality is about a century old. Psychologists have relied largely on questionnaires and other testing methods to map out its dimensions. One common method is for scientists to ask their subjects how well certain adjectives apply to themselves (or to people they know well).

"Certain traits tend to go together," Dr. Gosling said. "We find that people who are energetic also tend to be talkative. It needn't be that way, but that's how it tends to be." The flip side is true as well: less energetic people tend to be less talkative.

Psychologists have found they can bundle these traits into just a few personality dimensions. People may be more or less extroverted, for example, which means they are sociable, assertive and tend to have positive emotions. The same dimensions have been documented across the world, from Zimbabwe to the Russian Arctic, suggesting that they are universal in humans.

Some studies have suggested that genes are responsible for some of the differences in people's personality ratings. But they have been far from conclusive because scientists cannot do experiments with humans. "Human mothers will not let you just swap their infants at birth, which would be a great study to do," Dr. Gosling said.

It has been only in the last decade or so that scientists have investigated whether animals have personalities. In one pioneering study in the mid-1990's, Dr. Gosling studied a colony of 34 hyenas at the University of California, Berkeley. "My goal was simply to say, can we measure personality in animals? It wasn't clear it was going to work," he said.

Dr. Gosling asked the four caretakers of the colony to fill out a modified version of the human questionnaire for each animal.

"It turned out that they agreed at the level you find in humans," Dr. Gosling said. What's more, the hyena personalities fit some of the dimensions found in humans, like neuroticism and agreeableness. Since then, a number of other studies have documented personalities in animals ranging from chimpanzees to squid.

To some biologists, the main question about these animal personalities is why natural selection keeps such a wide range of them. "Why hasn't one personality become the standard in the population?" asked Dr. Drent. If being extroverted offers the best odds for a hyena to reproduce, you might expect that over time, all hyenas would wind up as extroverts.

Dr. Drent and his colleagues hope that their study on birds may reveal some clues. They are studying a European relative of chickadees called the great tit (Parus major). Most of the birds spend their entire lives in a single forest, and they are happy to move into comfortable nest boxes provided by the scientists. As a result, the Dutch researchers can track the entire population of birds for years, keeping tabs on their health and their success at reproducing.

The scientists can also bring some of the birds into the lab in order to measure their personalities or carry out breeding experiments.

"These birds are perfect for these sorts of studies," said Dr. Niels Dingemanse of the University of Groningen, a collaborator Dr. Drent.

Instead of questionnaires, the Dutch team tests the behavior of the birds to measure their personalities. In one test, the scientists place a strange object - a penlight battery or a Pink Panther doll - in a bird's cage. Some birds are quick to approach it, while others hang back.

***continued on next post****

[Sushi]

In another experiment, the researchers open a cage door, allowing the birds to explore a large room filled with five artificial trees. Some birds are quick to explore the trees, while others prefer to remain in the comforts of their cage.

In a third experiment, the researchers place a bowl of tasty mealy worms in the room. When the birds land on the bowl to eat, the researchers startle the birds by lifting up a nearby metal plate. They then see how much time passes before the bird returns to the bowl.

The tests revealed that the birds have consistent personalities that remain stable for years. Bold birds, as the scientists call them, are quick to inspect new objects, to explore the trees and to recover from the metal-plate surprise.

Shy birds are slow on all three counts. The differences go well beyond these tests. Bold birds are also more aggressive than shy ones and experience less stress when the scientists handle them.

Breeding experiments revealed that these traits had a strong genetic basis. Over just four generations, the researchers could produce significantly bolder and shyer birds. "About 50 percent of the variation you find in avian personalities is due to differences in genes," said Dr. Kees van Oers of the Max Planck Institute for Ornithology in Germany.

Dr. van Oers is searching for the genes responsible for these differences. He estimates that as many as 10 may play an important role, and he has already pinpointed one strong candidate, known as DRD4.

Some studies on the human version of this gene suggest that it influences how much people seek out new experiences. But other studies have failed to replicate the link. "We're still working on the last bits, but it looks promising," Dr. van Oers said.

The genes for both bold and shy traits have been preserved by natural selection. To find out how this happens, the researchers have observed how birds with different traits have fared over the years. "We were not sure how the data would turn out because no one had collected them before," said Dr. Dingemanse, who led this part of the study.

The researchers found that the personality of birds had a powerful effect on their survival, but that effect changed from year to year as the supply of food fluctuated. "It's quite a complex story," Dr. Dingemanse said. In lean years, for example, bold female birds had a better chance of surviving than shy ones, while shy males did better than bold ones. Those patterns switched during years with abundant food.

Over the course of several years, however, birds with intermediate personalities appear to have had more success at bearing young. "Animals in the middle did better," Dr. Dingemanse said.

If intermediate birds are better adapted than very bold or shy ones, it is strange that all the birds are not intermediate. One possibility is intermediate personalities arise when birds inherit a "bold" version of certain genes from one parent and a "shy" version from the other.

Since a bird has a 50 percent chance of inheriting a gene from its mother or father, it's inevitable that some will wind up with two "shy" genes or two "bold" ones. As a result, they may get extreme personalities.

Another idea the Dutch scientists want to explore is that the social life of birds helps bold and shy personalities to coexist.

Each year the birds fight for territory where they can feed and breed. Bold birds are more aggressive than shy ones, and that sometimes helps them win territory. But the scientists have found that when bold birds lose, they are slow to recover. They end up at the bottom of the hierarchy, and in many cases just fly away. "They go to other places to try to become No. 1," Dr. Drent said.

This struggle might balance the birds between bold and shy personalities. If there are a lot of shy birds, the few bold ones will rise to the top. But if there are a lot of bold birds, they will fight a lot, and that will result in a lot of bold birds flying away. In these cases, the few shy birds will thrive. "So one of the personalities can never disappear completely," Dr. Drent said.

He and his colleagues plan to test this hypothesis by altering the ratio of bold and shy birds in the wild.

Many of the findings are summarized in the February issue of Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews.

Researchers studying animal personality hope that their work will yield some practical benefits. Dr. Gosling and his students, for example, have been focusing much of their research on the personalities of dogs.

An accurate test of dog personality may help animal shelters match pets to families. It may also help identify dogs that are especially well suited to jobs like detecting explosives.

Studies on animal personality may also illuminate human personality. The Dutch researchers are now beginning to compare their research on birds to research carried out on children.

"It was amazing how the way they measured the boldness of the birds resembles tests we have for young children," said Dr. Marcel van Aken, a psychologist at the University of Utrecht. He and the bird researchers plan to measure the personalities of birds and humans with a common set of tests, hoping to find clues to the evolution of human personality.

Barely any research has been carried out on the evolution of human personality, but what little there is suggests that it may have some parallels with what's happened in birds.

In a survey of 545 people, Dr. Daniel Nettle of the University of Newcastle in England found that the more extroverted people were, the more sex partners they tended to have had. That might give them an evolutionary edge, but Dr. Nettle found that they were also more likely to wind up in a hospital.

Dr. Nettle is reporting his findings in a paper to be published in Evolution and Human Behavior.

Some experts on human personality remain skeptical. Dr. Daniel Cervone of the University of Illinois at Chicago considers describing animals with terms like extroversion as "extremely risky." The word inevitably means something different when applied to a human or a bird.

"There's a whole load of human qualities that simply weren't going into the ratings in the first place," he said.

Dr. van Aken agrees that anthropomorphism is a real danger, but he thinks it can be avoided. "I'm not so concerned about it," he says. "You have to define clearly what you are going to measure and then let the data speak."

[JSpaceman]

They must have been studying the cows from Far Side cartoons... :D

[akip]

as a maryland girl, i've always had a special place in my heart for cows. but now i find out they're cool.

maybe i won't buy that organic hamburger tonight.

[DaysWithoutEnd]

How did they find all this out about cows?
Wouldn't that require some ANIMAL TESTING??
Shame on you Yosh!
:p

[Docta]

Well, if we stopped eating cows there just wouldn't be any more cows because they'd have no use. It's not like they could survive in our modern world.


as if the title of this thread doesn't crack my ass up enough, you pull out this line

damn, too funny

[postfeminist]

i love far side cows. :)

i like it when they wear glasses!

[Sovrana]

yosh, why is it that I get the feeling this researcher is pushing Cow Social Security?

[slow-dog]

Are cows that solve intellectual challenges tastier? What about cows that bear grudges? Because if not, we can solve this problem by breeding dumber cows with attention spans too short to remember grudges.

Problem solved.

;)

[slow-dog]

yosh, why is it that I get the feeling this researcher is pushing Cow Social Security?

Well, most cows already have full health coverage, so it's the next logical step.

[slow-dog]

I am actually fascinated by the lines your drawing Yosh. Your desire to improve the welfare of animals is, if I understand it, based on their intelligence and their ability to feel pain. I believe you're a vegan, so my question is, where exactly do you set the bar? Or, to put it in another way, could we genetically engineer a cow so dumb, and so without response to stimulus, sense, etc., that you'd be okay with eating it? Enquiring minds want to know. I want to know.

[yoshomon]

I don't think intelligence should have anything to do with how we treat an animal (human or nonhuman). If intelligence determined the ethical consideration one would recieve, then it would be "ok" to kill people in comas and mentally disabled folks.

[slow-dog]

I don't think intelligence should have anything to do with how we treat an animal (human or nonhuman). If intelligence determined the ethical consideration one would recieve, then it would be "ok" to kill people in comas and mentally disabled folks.

Fair enough. So do you just draw the line at anything in Kingdom Animalia? <devious grin> So you base your whole ethical system and moral compass with respect to food based on a man-made construct, and a bunch of definitions thrust upon society by dead white men? </devious grin> You don't have to answer that, though. This will devolve into a what-is-life thread, and then someone will bring up abortion, and then nothing will get accomplished....

[yoshomon]

It's really simple: sentient life (aka animals).

[markalot]

Is this the farming thread?