But modern farms deprive them of meaningful companionship.
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| © Esther Aarts |
A cow is a beast bred for uniformity. Whether black-and-white Holsteins or ginger-colored Jerseys, the marvel of the herd
is that such unvaried selfsameness has been coaxed, over time, out of
bovine diversity. Identical cows lift up identical, dozy eyes. Jaws
slide, muffled by fodder, chewing cud. A handful of breeds dominates the
beef, dairy, and leather industries the world over. Cattle are “a human
product like rayon,” Annie Dillard once wrote, encountering steers in
Virginia. “They’re like a field of shoes.” People manufacture them. In
the past 40 years alone, agricultural scientists seeking to increase
milk production have altered at least 23 percent of the Holstein’s
genome.
Those of us who readily mistake one cow for another
may be surprised to learn that these animals not only recognize one
another as individuals, but have friends they prefer. Indeed, it turns
out that cows are especially interested in—and affectionate
toward—particular other cows. A kind of sisterhood is thought to feature
in their social lives.
What is friendship, in the case of a cow?
For decades, behavioral studies of livestock have tended to focus on
aggression, because fighting between animals can result in physical
injuries and economic loss. Bovine companionship, a less conspicuous
dynamic, long went underrecorded—at least as a subject of scientific
inquiry. As herd sizes have increased and greater numbers of cows have
been subjected to intensive stall-feeding, the incentives to understand
cow stress, and cow resilience, have grown.
Cow friendship, researchers now believe,
is expressed foremost in grazing and licking. A study of a commercial
herd in the United Kingdom found that, put to pasture, more than half of
the animals spent time eating and resting alongside a specific
individual. Separated from the larger group, cows that were paired with their favored friend
maintained lower heart rates and did not stamp, toss their heads, pace,
or sway as much as cows paired with individuals they’d shown no
partiality toward. In short, they seemed less agitated. A different study suggested
that cows were able to recognize others they knew in real life from
photographs, which they then ran toward. As for licking, cows seem to
lick the heads, necks, and backs of other cows for a reason similar to
why chimpanzees groom each other—to bond. One set of findings, published
a few years ago, showed that among Austrian Simmental cows, licking
reduced bovine heart rates—though only for the receivers of licks. In
Kenya, Zebu cattle lick discerningly,
but without reciprocity. A long-term observational study of a herd of
31 Zebu on the Athi Plains found that most of these animals preferred to
seek a familiar friend to lick, and that in a given friendship, one cow
was almost always the licker, and the other cow, the lickee. However,
this hierarchy did not align with the social structure of the herd: The
dominant Zebu were not the most popular Zebu to lick. Nor could the
researchers identify what made a Zebu likely to be licked. Still, the
cows appeared to maintain consistent allies for several years.
You
might assume the affectionate attachments of cows to be a side effect
of domestication, but there is evidence that wild bovines, too, form
platonic partnerships. Older male buffalo, for example, sometimes
establish dyads with other bulls. Among these and other hoofed,
herbivorous animals that congregate in very large numbers, perhaps
friendship proved adaptive across generations because individuals that
remained clustered— and vigilant to predators—were more likely than
others to survive.
Whether or not bovine friendship is an evolutionary legacy, the
American commercial milking cow’s life affords little opportunity for
other social contact. The majority of cows in the United States are artificially inseminated
so as to bear the calves that bring on milk production (a single
Holstein bull, born in 1974, was the progenitor of more than 80,000
young). And in most instances, calves are removed from their mothers
soon after birth. Interactions with mates and offspring being
impossible, might female friendship fill the void?
Sadly, few cows
get the chance to find out. They tend to forget their friends quickly:
After just two weeks apart, individuals who once preferred each other no
longer display friendship’s behaviors or positive effects. This is
significant, because large-scale dairy farms may regroup a herd four to
12 times a year. Considering that cows without friends show evidence of
distress, thwarting cow friendship would seem to contribute to cow
suffering.
Surprisingly, the camaraderie between cows and people
also appears to affect bovine productivity, and perhaps contentment. A
2009 survey of more than 500 British dairy farmers revealed that cows
that had been given names produced 258 more liters of milk than did cows
that went unnamed and thus unrecognized as individuals.
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