Columns and Letters

Column: Concerning the mental health of cows

-by Frank Macdonald

    A study at the University of British Columbia has found that cows are bad at managing stress. Not all cows. Some cows are optimistic which, like humans, helps them cope with stress. Not so for pessimistic cows.
    According to this study, a cow’s personality traits can be identified within its first 25 to 50 days of life. This knowledge can help farmers choose the bovines most likely to improve their stock. For one thing, optimistic cows are less subject to getting sick later in life. The pessimistic ones are more prone to ill health, and may not be able to cope well with the situations they are subjected to during the routines of dairy farming.
    “In humans, we know that personality traits can really affect how people cope with stress, cope with challenges, or even (affect) their social lives and so on. We really wondered if it was applicable to animals as well,” explains Bejamin Lecorps, a PhD student in the university’s animal welfare program. Apparently, it is.
    From another source, Dr. Anna O’Brien, a dairy consultant and blogger (The Daily Vet) makes note of how frequent she hears music being played in dairy barns. Music apparently has a soothing effect on the animals, which may result in an increase in milk production.


    But which music seduces the most milk?
    It’s not surprising, I suppose, that, according to O’Brien, most farmers play country music to their herd. And why not? Country and western music has a rich vein of cow-sensitive or cow-centred music. What other music genre has paid more homage to the lowing cow than country and western singers: Eddie Arnold’s Cattle Call; Woody Guthrie’s Get Along Little Doggie; John Cash’s version of Ghost Riders in the Sky? So the odds are, one would think, that the per cow output would increase. Maybe.
    Maybe, too, country music may be the last thing a cow, pre-disposed to depression, needs to hear. Perhaps Hank William’s I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry may not be the ideal soundtrack to a depressed cow trying to give milk. At least that’s the findings of our aforementioned consultant’s research. (O’Brien does write that “I have a confession to make: I don’t like country music.”)
    Her bias aside, Dr. O’Brien has found that country music may be less effective on milk production than that classical band called Beethoven, Brahms, Bach, and the Boys. Apparently, they bring to the barn a sophistication of which country music falls short. In their barn gigs, apparently, these classical musicians don’t do country. To which the question arises: What is Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony but country music without the slide guitar?
    My own curiosity about cows and music has to do with dairy farms in Western Cape Breton where I live.
    What music, if any, do local dairy farmers choose to sooth the breast of their not very savage beasts? We still have farmers, a few, who can, sitting on a stool, hands rhythmically milking to a soothing Gaelic air, watch the bucket below catch enough milk to conclude that the cow is not depressed.
    But most farms here and everywhere have progressed beyond hand milking, so who does the singing then? Which brings me to thinking about our culture’s fondness for the fiddle, and more specifically of musicians such as the late Buddy Mac Master and a hundred other masters of this Cape Breton music genre.
    Fiddlers playing in the barn at milking time is just an assumption of mine. But when I think about it more deeply, I imagine the last thing dairy farmers in Inverness County or elsewhere would want is a square dance breaking out in the barn, as traditionally well suited as a barn may be for such a popular dance. Unfortunately, the spillage of milk when the cows are stepping their way through a Scotch Four, or swinging their way through the third figure of a square set, could be counter productive.
    It should be pointed out, as well, that this University of British Columbia research seems primarily focussed on the mental health issues of dairy cows. Despite the pre-disposition of some dairy cows to pessimism, the reality is that dairy cows are provided a long, well cared for life in exchange for offering, however reluctantly, their milk to humans. They even have maternity leave in their contracts when one pauses to birth more calves. While a dairy cow’s life is a life in captivity, it is a life.
    What though, would be the results if a study of similar personality traits in cows were carried out on beef cattle? Somewhere deep in their DNA I suspect that beef cattle know their fate. They are the direct descendants of the Biblical fatted calf, fated for a spit over a fire pit, or the barbecue. I don’t suppose there’s much optimism to be found among them no matter whose music plays the soundtrack to their lives. Unless, of course, some compassionate farmer stirs a fistful of Valium into the feed buckets.




 

 

 

 

 

 


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